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Modern Pilgrimage Site

House of the Virgin Mary

HOWSS of the VUR-jin MAIR-ee · Modern Meryemana, Mt. Koressos, ~7 km from Selçuk, İzmir Province, Turkey · 37.9117° N, 27.3342° E

A small stone house on a hillside above Ephesus venerated by Catholic and, separately, Muslim pilgrims as the place where the Virgin Mary lived out her final years under the care of the Apostle John. The tradition rests on John 19:26-27, where the dying Jesus entrusts Mary to John's household, combined with the separately attested tradition that John later ministered in Ephesus. IMPORTANT: this specific house was not identified by archaeology or continuous historical memory — it was located in 1881 by a French priest using descriptions from the 19th-century visions of a German nun, Anne Catherine Emmerich, who never traveled to Turkey.

Archaeology

The site was pinpointed in 1881 by Abbé Julien Gouyet and confirmed by Lazarist missionaries in 1891, working entirely from visionary descriptions published after Emmerich's death — not from any prior local tradition or excavation trail pointing to this exact structure. Investigators found foundations consistent with a 1st-century building beneath a later chapel, but this only shows a house existed there in antiquity, not that it was Mary's. The Catholic Church has deliberately never ruled on the site's authenticity "for lack of scientifically acceptable evidence," even as it has supported pilgrimage there since Pope Leo XIII in 1896.