Kaleici Museum

About Kaleici Museum

The Kaleiçi Museum, in full the Suna & İnan Kıraç Kaleiçi Museum, is a small private museum in Antalya's old town at Kocatepe Street No. 25 in the Barbaros neighbourhood, run by the Suna & İnan Kıraç Research Centre for Mediterranean Civilizations (AKMED) of Koç University. The Kıraç couple bought two registered historic buildings and restored them between 1993 and 1995, and the museum opened in 1996. The first building is a traditional two-storey Turkish house of the 19th century, typical of Antalya homes of the period, arranged as an ethnographic museum with life-size tableaux of scenes from Kaleiçi life in the second half of the 1800s, such as serving coffee, the shaving of the groom and the henna night. The second is a former Greek Orthodox church dedicated to Aya Yorgi (St George), repaired in 1863, which now serves as an exhibition space: its main floor houses a collection of Çanakkale ceramics, including a valuable ceramic map of Turkey presented to Atatürk, while the upper floor hosts changing thematic exhibitions, concerts and art events. Quiet and little visited, the museum gives a vivid picture in a short time of the Ottoman Antalya house and of the old quarter's religious diversity.

Where:

Antalya, Türkiye