Meryemana
(The Virgin Mary's House)
It is known with certainty that the Virgin Mary went to Ephesus and lived
there for some time. Whether or not she died in Ephesus was not known
until Anne Catherine Emmerich's vision. The stigmatized German nun who
had never been to Ephesus had a vision of the House of the Virgin Mary
and described it in detail to the German writer Clemens Brentano who later
published a book about it. Catherine Emmerich died in 1884. In 1891 Paul,
Superior of the Lazarists from Izmir read about her vision and found a
little building, which corresponded with Emmerich's descriptions. Archeological
evidence showed that the little house was from the 6C AD but that the
foundations were from the 1C AD.
This place was officially declared a shrine of the Roman Catholic Church in 1896, and since then it has become a popular place of pilgrimage. Pope Paul VI visited the shrine in 1967.
