The Maraş Lion
A basalt statue just 41 cm tall carrying a Luwian text from a king of Gurgum, late ninth century BC.
Klaus-Peter Simon — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Klaus-Peter Simon — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Dosseman — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Klaus-Peter Simon — CC BY-SA 3.0
The most famous object in this museum is barely forty centimetres tall. The Maraş Lion is a squat black basalt beast whose flanks carry a Luwian hieroglyphic text in which a king of the Neo-Hittite kingdom of Gurgum names his father and grandfather and pledges loyalty to his gods, some 2,800 years ago. Two German explorers found it on the city's citadel in 1883; it then spent over a century in the Istanbul Archaeology Museum before coming home in 2013. Anyone expecting a gate-guardian the size of a car will be surprised, but stand close and read the carving on a stone this small and you understand why it ranks among the key texts of a kingdom almost nobody has heard of. The second surprise lives in the Ancient Elephant Hall: the skeleton of an Asian elephant roughly 3,500 years old, found whole by a farmer in the Gâvur Gölü marsh country of Türkoğlu district in 1975. It lay flat in a case for decades until a restoration team raised it back onto its legs in 2012, five metres tall and seven long. The Syrian elephant vanished from this land more than two thousand years ago, and this is the exhibit children make straight for. Beside it stands a second, smaller skeleton from the same marsh. The remaining halls of the seven run chronologically from the Palaeolithic to Byzantium: a life-size reconstruction of the Direkli cave dig, Neolithic finds from Domuztepe mound, a mosaic hall of floors lifted from Roman Germanicia, the city that lies beneath modern Kahramanmaraş, then sarcophagi, grave stelae and small finds. The museum has stood on this site since 1975; the present building reopened in May 2012 after a rebuild. It closed after the 6 February 2023 earthquakes, its collection packed away while a badly damaged neighbouring building threatened to collapse, and reopened with a completely reorganised display in late August 2025, so the galleries now feel crisp and current. Allow an hour at most. It is easy with a family: level floors and a children's education room. Nobody should cross the country for it, but it turns a day in Kahramanmaraş from an ice-cream stop into a city with a Hittite past. Pair it with the Germanicia mosaic site in the Bağlarbaşı neighbourhood a few minutes' drive away, to see floors in situ after seeing the finest of them here. Admission is three euros for foreign visitors; open daily 08:00 to 17:00, last tickets at 16:30.
A basalt statue just 41 cm tall carrying a Luwian text from a king of Gurgum, late ninth century BC.
A roughly 3,500-year-old elephant skeleton raised to five metres, the exhibit children head for first.
Roman and early Byzantine floors lifted from the ancient city that lies beneath modern Kahramanmaraş.
Azerbaycan Bulvarı No:35, Yenişehir Mah., Dulkadiroğlu
Yes if you have a spare hour, but do not measure it against Gaziantep's Zeugma Mosaic Museum. This is a small provincial museum whose pull is the Maraş Lion and an elephant skeleton that delights children. If time is tight, Zeugma is the priority, no contest.
Very much so: a modern building with level floors, a children's education room, and the giant elephant and the cave reconstruction hold young attention better than the display cases. The whole visit is over before they tire of it.
