İzmir Ethnography Museum

Address Bahri Baba Park, Konak, İzmir

The İzmir Ethnography Museum, housed in a nineteenth-century former French hospital in Bahri Baba Park, covers the traditional material culture of İzmir and the surrounding region from the Ottoman period through the early Republic. The collection includes traditional costumes, ceramics, camel wrestling paraphernalia, copper and silverware, and a reconstruction of a traditional pharmacy and print workshop.

The museum is a compact and undervisited complement to the Archaeological Museum next door. The section on İzmir's Levantine heritage — the cosmopolitan community of Greeks, Armenians, Jews, and European merchants who shaped the city before 1922 — is particularly interesting. Open Tuesday through Sunday; combination tickets available with the Archaeological Museum.

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A story
The building that houses the Ethnography Museum was originally a French hospital, built in the 1830s by the Franciscan order to serve İzmir's large Catholic Levantine community. After the founding of the Republic, the hospital was repurposed and eventually became the home of İzmir's ethnographic collections. The transition from hospital to museum of traditional life is more apt than it might seem — both institutions were concerned with the care and preservation of what the city held most valuable.

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