İzmir Archaeological Museum

About this place

The star exhibit was never dug up; it was hauled out of the sea. A bronze runner, a young athlete of the late Hellenistic period lifted from the water off ancient Kyme north of İzmir, survived centuries on the seabed with the tension still in his limbs. Around him sit roughly six thousand pieces from the great cities of the Aegean coast: Old Smyrna at Bayraklı, Ephesus, Pergamon, Miletus, Klazomenai and Teos. The three-storey building opened in February 1984, but the collection is far older, begun in 1924 in Basmane, housed in the disused Aya Vukla church from 1927, then in Kültürpark from 1951 before the move here. The museum stands inside Bahribaba Park above Konak Square, ten minutes' gentle uphill walk from the Clock Tower and easy enough with children. The two upper floors are the galleries: the stone works hall of Roman marbles, joined by a bronze Demeter that, like the runner, came out of an Aegean wreck; a treasury room of Roman and Ottoman coins alongside fine gold jewellery; the Ekrem Akurgal ceramics hall arranged chronologically from the Bronze Age onward; and finds from the harbour settlement at Limantepe, centuries older than anything Greek. The celebrated marble Poseidon and Demeter from the Smyrna Agora are not here but in the History and Art Museum in Kültürpark. The front and rear gardens hold big sarcophagi and stone monuments you can read in the open air. Be honest with yourself: this is not the Ephesus Museum in Selçuk. The most famous Ephesian pieces went there, some of the labels here are terse, and the building looks its age. What it offers is the best single overview of the region's antiquities without leaving the city, done comfortably in under an hour and a half, and nearly empty even in high summer, which makes it a fair refuge from an August noon. At four euros for foreign visitors it is about as cheap as a state museum of this size gets. The Ethnography Museum in the old stone building next door, a nineteenth-century hospital, is temporarily closed for restoration according to the ministry, so do not plan around it. Pair the visit with Konak Square and the Kemeraltı bazaar below, or with the nearby Asansör lift for the sunset view over the bay.