River
Fluvius Castur
Küçük Menderes
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Mud carried down by Fluvius Castur slowly choked the harbour of Ephesus, as the Greek geographer Strabo and the Roman writer Pliny already observed, and the ruins of the city now lie about ten kilometres from the sea. The river is the Küçük Menderes in western Turkey, the little Maeander. Its name on the map is probably a copyist's slip for the Greek Kaystros, a river Homer mentions in the Iliad, and the form Castur appears nowhere else. Pliny noted that its silt had already joined the island of Syrie to the mainland, while a Byzantine lexicon traced the river's name to the burnt land nearby.