Kaleiçi Museum (Suna & İnan Kıraç)

About this place

A small Greek church that spent decades as a derelict storehouse, and a nineteenth-century Ottoman house sharing its courtyard: that is the whole museum, and it is enough to finally explain the closed wooden doors you keep walking past in the lanes of Kaleiçi. The businessman İnan Kıraç and his wife Suna bought both buildings in the early 1990s, the architect Sinan Genim restored them between 1993 and 1995, and the museum opened on 18 May 1996. It is run today by AKMED, Koç University's research centre for Mediterranean civilisations, which is why the labels are unusually careful. The house is the part Gulf and Levantine visitors tend to love, because it is familiar to the point of surprise. You enter over a pebble-mosaic floor, its stones gathered from Konyaaltı beach and kept damp so the doorway stayed cool all day, then climb to an upper floor where three rooms stage a household in wedding season: receiving guests with coffee, the dowry room, and the henna night. The life-size figures wear genuine regional dress, the rugs, covers and furniture were all collected from Antalya homes, and the painted wooden ceilings copy the Tekelioğlu Mansion nearby. The henna night alone will start an argument in any Arab family that knows the same ritual with different details. The second building is the Church of St George (Aya Yorgi), rebuilt in 1863 with donations from the town's Christians, as the inscription over the eastern door says, written in Turkish but in Greek letters. After the population exchange of the 1920s it lost its congregation, became a warehouse and lost its woodwork, until it was bought in 1991 and restored. Its blue vaulted ceiling now shelters a collection of brightly glazed Çanakkale ceramics and rotating temporary shows; recent themes have included nineteenth-century street sellers and fishing tales from antiquity. Be honest with the family before you go: this is a thirty to forty-five minute visit, and the wooden stairs of the house are not for pushchairs. But the ticket is nominal, children of 14 and under enter free, and the rooms are cool and shaded in August heat, a few minutes' walk from the Kaleiçi harbour. It closes on Mondays, so plan your old-town loop around that.