The nucleus of Turkey’s first museum was collections of gifts, spoils of war and weapons that amassed in Topkapi Palace over the centuries. This transition from palace collections to museum is a pattern that can be seen in Europe, too. In 1846 War Minister Fethi Ahmet Pasa decided that these objects would be of interest to the public, and had them displayed in the former Byzantine Church of St. Eirene. Minister of Education Saffet Paşa also took a close interest in the Imperial Museum, as it was called. Subsequently Mr E. Goold, a teacher at Galatasaray High School, became director of the museum, followed in 1872-1881 by the German historian, archaeologist, epigraphist and painter Dr Philip Anton Dethier.

Dr Dethier expanded the museum collections with innumerable new objects, and at his instigation legislation concerning the conservation of antiquities was passed in 1874. Upon Dethier’s death in 1881, the Turkish painter Osman Hamdi Bey succeeded him as director.

Osman Hamdi Bey had gone to Europe as young man with the intention of studying law, but instead studied art at the studios of several famous artists in Paris. As director of the Imperial Museum he pressed for the construction of a new museum building, the present Istanbul Archaeological Museum. The first section of this building was opened to the public in 1899, the second section in 1903, and the third section in 1908. The regulations relating to antiquities were revised in 1883 to prevent the removal of antiquities from the country, and warehouses for storing antiquities were established in Salonika, Sivas, Bursa and Konya, forming the nucleus for future provincial museums. Osman Hamdi Bey also led the first scientific Turkish excavations at Mount Nemrut, the Lagina Temple of Hecate, Sidon, and other ancient sites, and their finds were brought back to Istanbul and placed in the Imperial Museum. For these reasons Osman Hamdi Bey is regarded as the father of Turkish curatorship.

With the founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923, Turkish museums received a new boost, since Mustafa Kemal Atatürk believed that culture was the foundation stone of the state. He encouraged new excavations, and sent students abroad to study archaeology. He personally visited the Ahlatlıbel excavation site in 1933, and took a close interest in the excavations of Alacahöyük, a prehistoric settlement of key importance with respect to the early Hittites in particular. New museums were opened around the country to house the huge quantities of finds, since Turkey is a land which has been home, often simultaneously, to many different peoples and cultures over the millenia.

Today there are 160 museums under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture across the country, containing around two and a half million objects. Kayseri Museum, for instance, began life is a small collection of pottery and figurines in Kayseri High School, gradually growing into a major provincial museum with finds from the Assyrian colony settlement at Kültepe, and later on from excavations of the Syro-Hittite sites of Göllüdağ and Arslantepe. Purchases have also swelled the collection, which includes many rare objects from the Assyrian colonies which thrived in Anatolia around 2000 BC.Ephesus Museum in Selçuk is devoted entirely to finds from Ephesus itself, like Bergama Museum, which contains finds from ancient Pergamum and is a focal point for classical period archaeology.

The world’s first museum of nautical archaeology is in Bodrum, a showplace for finds from ancient wrecks covering several thousand years discovered in the coastal waters of the region. Çatalhöyük, the most celebrated Neolithic site of western Asia and one of the earliest known cities ever discovered (6000-7000 BC), is soon to have its own small museum. Finds from Çatalhöyük, where the world’s oldest wall paintings and reliefs were found in the 1960s, were sent to the Museum of Anatolian Civilisations in Ankara and to Konya Museum. Among them are figurines of the mother goddess which attracted considerable excitement in the academic world. The museum will enable finds from new excavations to be exhibited on the site, which adds to its interest for visitors and is one of the aims of modern museum curatorship.

Another museum of this type is the Istanbul Great Palace Mosaics Museum, where the mosaics of the Byzantine Great Palace are exhibited.Most of Turkey’s museums are archaeologically oriented, although they often also include sections on ethnography, anthropology, geology, botany and so on. In addition there are openair museums in areas of both natural and historic interest, such as the Göreme, Zelve, and Yesemek museums, art museums (painting and sculpture, and manuscripts), technology museums (cartography and industry), private museums, university and municipal museums.

Turkish museums have made considerable progress in recent years, introducing modern exhibition methods and new technology which provide a greater degree of interaction between the exhibits and visitors, so arousing more interest, and by putting the exhibits in context are more informative. Turkish museums have won the European Museum of the Year prize several times in recent years, Antalya Museum, the Museum of Anatolian Civilisations, Istanbul Archaeological Museum, Bodrum Museum of Nautical Archaeology, and Ephesus Museum being among them. A visit to any of these museums shows how much progress museums in Turkey have made today, from being mere systematic collections of objects to presenting a documentary of life and culture in the past.

* Şengül Aydıngün is an archaeologist and art historian.