by Hasan Gülday — nationally licensed Turkish tour guide, Ephesus specialist
Standing in Front of a Face I Know by Heart
There is a moment, near the end of almost every tour I give in Ephesus, when people stop talking.
We come down the marble of Curetes Street, the heat still rising from the stone even in the late afternoon, and then the Library of Celsus opens up in front of us. Two storeys of columns, the broken pediments, the four marble women standing in their niches — Sophia, Episteme, Ennoia, Arete. Wisdom, knowledge, intelligence, virtue. And for a few seconds nobody reaches for a camera. They just look.
Last year I wrote an article where I imagined this same façade through the eyes of ten painters — Warhol, da Vinci, Monet, Picasso, Dalí and the others. It was meant to be a bit of fun on a quiet winter evening. I did not expect it to stay with me the way it did. But every time I walked back to the library after that, I kept thinking, what would Van Gogh have done with this light? What would a Japanese printmaker have made of these columns?
So here is the second round. Ten more artists, ten more styles, none of them repeated from the first list. Same stone. Different eyes. Taş aynı, gören göz farklı — the stone is the same, the seeing eye is different.
A small honest warning before we start. I am a tour guide, not an art historian, and a good part of what follows is simply my own opinion. Take it the way you would take it standing next to me on the marble: as one man talking, not as the final word.
What if Vincent van Gogh stood in front of Celsus Library and painted it in Post-Impressionism Style?
Vincent van Gogh sold almost nothing while he was alive. Today a single one of his canvases could buy a small district of Izmir. There is a lesson in that somewhere, though I am never quite sure what it is.
What I love about him for this is the movement. Van Gogh did not paint things sitting still — he painted the energy running through them. The sky in The Starry Night does not hang quietly above the village; it turns, it breathes. Put him in front of the Celsus Library at the end of a hot day and the marble stops being cold. The columns ripple. The gold light of an Ephesus evening becomes thick, swirling paint you could almost scrape off the wall with a fingernail. He matters because he taught all of us that a painting can carry a feeling, not only a picture. This one would carry the heat of the stone.
What if Gustav Klimt stood in front of Celsus Library and painted it in Art Nouveau Style?
Gustav Klimt is gold. That is the short version.
He led the Vienna Secession at the turn of the last century, and his famous golden phase came after he travelled to Ravenna and stood in front of the Byzantine mosaics there. You can see it in everything after — all that shimmer, the flat gold grounds, the pattern that swallows the whole surface. Now, the Library of Celsus was real marble, warm and honey-coloured in the right light. In Klimt’s hands it would become something closer to a reliquary: gold leaf, spirals, ornament climbing over every cornice until the building looks less like architecture and more like a piece of jewellery left standing in the valley. Honestly, this one might be my favourite of the ten. It suits the place.
What if Katsushika Hokusai stood in front of Celsus Library and painted it in Ukiyo-e Style?
Here is a small thing most visitors do not know. The European Impressionists — Monet, Van Gogh and their friends — were half in love with Japanese woodblock prints. They collected them. They copied them. And the man at the centre of that craze was Katsushika Hokusai, who gave the world The Great Wave off Kanagawa, probably one of the most reproduced images that has ever existed.
Edo-period Japan and Roman Ephesus never met. That is exactly why I want to see them in the same frame. Flat planes of colour, a bold black outline, a sky full of those famous curling clouds, and the Celsus façade sitting underneath like a temple from a country Hokusai never visited. A Japanese eye on a Roman building in Anatolia. I do not really know why it works. It just does.
What if Giorgio de Chirico stood in front of Celsus Library and painted it in Metaphysical Style?
Giorgio de Chirico was Italian, though he was actually born in Greece, and he invented a strange, quiet kind of painting he called metaphysical art. Empty squares. Long afternoon shadows. Classical arches with nobody standing underneath them. The feeling that the world has just been left, a minute ago, by everyone who used to live in it.
If you have ever stood at Ephesus at the very end of the day, when the last group has gone up to the gate and the guards are starting to look at their watches, you already know this painting. The site empties. The shadows stretch long across the marble. For about ten minutes the whole place belongs to nobody and to everybody at once. That is de Chirico. Of all ten styles, this is the one closest to what the library actually feels like when the crowds have gone.
What if Piet Mondrian stood in front of Celsus Library and painted it in De Stijl Style?
And now the opposite of de Chirico’s dreamy emptiness: pure, hard geometry.
Piet Mondrian was a Dutch painter who spent years cutting painting down to almost nothing. Straight black lines. White space. Only red, yellow and blue. No curves, no shadows, no marble — just the bones. This is the boldest jump in the whole list, because the Library of Celsus is all about its curves and its broken edges, and Mondrian would throw every one of them away. The façade becomes a grid. The columns become coloured blocks. Some of you will hate this one. Some of you will print it and hang it in the hall. That little grid of his, by the way, went on to shape modern buildings, posters, even a famous fashion dress. Not bad for red, yellow and blue.
What if Edvard Munch stood in front of Celsus Library and painted it in Expressionism Style?
You know his most famous painting even if his name means nothing to you. The figure on the bridge, hands pressed to the face, mouth open. The Scream. That is Edvard Munch, a Norwegian who painted feelings instead of facts — fear, love, loss, all of it written into nervous, wavy lines that never sit still.
A Munch version of the Celsus Library would not be a calm postcard. The sky would burn orange and red. The columns would lean and tremble as if the marble itself were anxious about something. It would be the library of a bad dream, or of a very strong feeling. Not for everyone. But powerful, and it would stay in your head.
What if Georges Seurat stood in front of Celsus Library and painted it in Pointillism Style?
Georges Seurat did something a little crazy. Instead of painting with brushstrokes, he built his pictures out of thousands of tiny separate dots of pure colour, and let your eye do the mixing from a few steps back. His huge masterpiece, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, took him around two years of patient dotting.
He died at thirty-one. I always find that hard to sit with — so much patience, so little time. A pointillist Celsus Library would reward the close looker, the kind of visitor who leans right into the glass case in the museum while everyone else walks straight past. From across the room: the library. From up close: a galaxy of dots. Worth standing close for.
What if El Greco stood in front of Celsus Library and painted it in Mannerism Style?
El Greco means the Greek. He was born Doménikos Theotokópoulos on the island of Crete, then made his name far away in Toledo, in Spain. His style — we call it Mannerism — stretches everything tall and thin and lights it with a strange, stormy, almost holy glow. His figures look like flames standing up.
There is a nice quiet logic to letting a Greek painter loose on the Celsus Library, because Ephesus was for centuries a Greek and then a Greco-Roman city before it was anything else. Under El Greco’s hand the columns would grow impossibly tall, the sky would go heavy and silver, and the whole monument would seem to lift up off the ground. He was so far ahead of his own time that painters like Picasso only truly understood him three hundred years later. Three hundred years. Think about that for a moment.
What if Tamara de Lempicka stood in front of Celsus Library and painted it in Art Deco Style?
If the 1920s and 30s had a face, Tamara de Lempicka painted it. She was a Polish artist and the great name of Art Deco — sleek, glossy, glamorous, her people looking almost carved out of polished steel and chrome. Cool. Confident. A little bit cinema.
Art Deco loved grand geometry, big clean shapes, monumental fronts — which is exactly what the Library of Celsus already has. So this one is a natural fit. Imagine the façade redrawn as the poster for a film that was never made, all sharp light and metallic shine, somewhere between ancient Ephesus and 1930s Hollywood. Interest in Lempicka has come roaring back in the last few years, and I am not surprised. The look never really went out of fashion.
What if Yayoi Kusama stood in front of Celsus Library and painted it in Polka-Dot Style?
We finish in our own time, with someone still alive and still working: Yayoi Kusama, the Japanese artist whose polka dots, pumpkins and mirrored Infinity Rooms now pull enormous queues in every city lucky enough to host her. People wait hours. For dots.
That is the genius of it. Kusama took one simple idea — the dot — and committed to it so completely, for so many years, that it became unmistakably hers. A Kusama Library of Celsus would vanish under thousands of dots, red on white or yellow on black, the columns dissolving into pure pattern. After nine serious, painterly styles, it is the perfect bit of madness to end on. A two-thousand-year-old library, covered in spots. Why not.
Why Does an Ephesus Tour Guide Keep Reimagining the Library of Celsus?
People asked me several times why a working tour guide spends his evenings imagining the Library of Celsus as a Mondrian grid or a field of Kusama dots. It is a fair question. Let me try to answer it honestly.
I have been walking guests through Ephesus for more than fifteen years now. I have said the words Library of Celsus out loud thousands of times. And the real danger, when you know a place that well, is that you slowly stop seeing it. It becomes a stop on a route, a thing you explain, a photo spot before lunch. Playing with these styles is, for me, a way of keeping my own eyes fresh. Every imagined version sends me back to the real marble looking for something I had walked straight past a hundred times.
That is also the heart of what I am trying to build. On my two websites, theephesus.com and toursaroundturkey.com, and on my YouTube channel, I am trying to do one stubborn thing: bring the real history — the inscriptions, the archaeology, the proper scholarship — together with the kind of storytelling that actually makes a person feel something standing there. Too much travel writing is either dry or empty. I want neither. I am also slowly writing a book, %100 Ephesus, built around the real questions travellers ask me on the marble, and projects like this little gallery are part of the same dream: to make people look at Ephesus for ten seconds longer than they planned to.
Because here is what I believe, and I will say it plainly.
The Library of Celsus is not finished. It was a tomb, a library, a ruin, a restoration. It has been a Roman senator’s monument and an Instagram background. Every visitor who stands in front of it and really looks adds one more version to the pile. The painters in this article never saw it. You can. That is not a small thing. Consider yourself lucky ☺
Now It Is Your Turn to Reimagine the Library of Celsus
So that is the second gallery. Van Gogh’s wind, Klimt’s gold, Hokusai’s wave, de Chirico’s silence, Mondrian’s grid, Munch’s nerves, Seurat’s dots, El Greco’s flame, Lempicka’s chrome, and Kusama’s beautiful madness. Ten more pairs of eyes on one old face.
Here is the strange part, and then I will let you go. None of these artists will ever stand where you can stand. Van Gogh never saw Anatolia. Hokusai never left Japan. Kusama, as far as I know, has not booked an Ephesus tour, or at least not with me! But you can be there by next week. You can stand on the warm marble at the end of the day, watch the four marble women hold up the front of the world’s most beautiful broken building, and reimagine it yourself — in whatever style lives behind your own eyes.
And when you come, I would be glad to walk down that street with you. If you would like to visit Ephesus and the Library of Celsus with a licensed guide who clearly thinks about this one monument far too much, you can reach me through contact section of my website.
Görüşürüz — see you soon.
Frequently Asked Questions About the Library of Celsus
Did these famous artists really paint the Library of Celsus?
No. This is a creative, AI-assisted thought experiment imagining how ten different artists and art movements might have painted the Library of Celsus in Ephesus. The real façade you can visit was carefully reconstructed by archaeologists in the 1970s.
Can I visit the Library of Celsus in Ephesus today?
Yes. The Library of Celsus is the centrepiece of Ephesus Ancient City near Selçuk — about a forty-minute drive from Kuşadası and roughly an hour from Izmir — and it is included in the main Ephesus site ticket.
When is the best time to photograph the Library of Celsus?
Late afternoon, once the sun swings round to light the façade and the day-trip and cruise crowds have thinned out. Quiet winter mornings work beautifully too — just dress warm and wear shoes with grip, the marble gets slippery after rain.
What were the ten styles in the first article?
The first gallery imagined the library through Pop Art, Renaissance, Impressionism, Abstract Expressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, Romanticism, Baroque, Rococo and Fauvism. You can read the first part here.
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