Konya Archaeological Museum

About this place

In the summer of 1958 a farmer ploughing his field at Yunuslar, out on the Beyşehir road, struck marble. What came out of the soil was a Roman sarcophagus with the Twelve Labours of Hercules carved around all four sides in relief so deep the figures almost step off the stone. It was brought to Konya that July, and it is still the object this whole museum is arranged around: a Sidamara-type sarcophagus of roughly 220-260 AD, two and a half metres long and 1.7 metres high, with two intact skeletons, a man and a woman, found inside. If you walked in for that alone you would have had your money's worth, except that it costs nothing. The museum is one of Anatolia's oldest, founded at the turn of the twentieth century (1899-1901) in a corner of a secondary school, then shuffled between the Mevlana complex and the İplikçi Mosque before settling in 1962 into its present building on Sahip Ata Caddesi, a few steps from the Sahip Ata mosque and dervish lodge. Around the big sarcophagus stand five more Roman marble ones, a six-metre Byzantine floor mosaic lifted from a church at Tatköy, Roman glass and bronze figurines, and obsidian arrowheads and pottery from Çatalhöyük, one of the oldest towns on earth, fifty kilometres south-east of the city. The garden and portico hold some 240 Greek and Latin inscriptions gathered from the towns St Paul passed through: Iconium, Lystra and Derbe. Know what you are getting. The galleries are small and the displays old-fashioned: glass cases, labels mostly in Turkish, none of the interactive kit you may know from Istanbul. Entry is free and half an hour to an hour is plenty. The main rooms have few steps and a pushchair gets through, but children will fade after the sarcophagus and the stone garden unless you tell them the story of Hercules, the lion and the monsters. It works best as a short stop before or after Çatalhöyük itself, where the site is earthen mounds under a shelter roof and the real finds are the ones you see here. The museum sits a little over a kilometre south-west of the Mevlana Museum, a few minutes by car or a quarter-hour's walk in mild weather, and closes on Mondays. If you are in Konya for Rumi and nothing else, you can skip it with a clear conscience; if the ancient world is your thing, you get a sarcophagus that holds its own against anything in Istanbul or Antalya, with no queue.