Christian tradition places the last years and burial of John the Evangelist at Ephesus, and it was over that revered tomb, on Ayasuluk Hill above the modern town of Selcuk, that the emperor Justinian ordered the construction of one of the largest churches of the early Byzantine world. Built on a cruciform plan and crowned by a series of domes, it was conceived on the scale of an imperial pilgrimage church, and even in ruin the outline remains legible: the atrium, the long nave flanked by re-erected columns, the marble pavements, the baptistery and, at the crossing, the raised tomb chamber that was the reason for everything else. From the terrace the view takes in the plain where the Temple of Artemis once stood, the Isa Bey Mosque below the walls and the ruins of Ephesus beyond, so that four religious ages sit in a single frame. The film uses aerial and ground coverage to restore the building's proportions and to explain how a burial place became, for centuries, one of the great pilgrimage destinations of the eastern Mediterranean.
