Hasan Suzar Ethnography Museum

This is really a continuation of my Soup and Ethnography entry. As I mentioned, a very helpful gentleman led us to the museum. When we finally came upon a sign directing us to the museum, it turns up a narrow, somewhat windy cobblestone street. Not far from the corner was what appeared to be a door in a wall and a couple of small windows on either side. Above the door was a brass plaque with the words “Hasan Suzar Ethnography Museum” (in Turkish, of course). The door led into a hallway with a room on either side; one was the ticket-selling area and the other was an office of some sort. The hallway opened into an beautiful courtyard – see photo below. The building is really a three-sided rectangle. The fourth side is simply a wall – there is a tree growing against it in the picture. The stairs in the photo lead to a large room denoted “Sister-in-Law Room.” Below were the servants' quarters.


The museum is really a three-story house occupied by an upper-class Gaziantep family during the 1920s and 30s. The back of the long side of the rectangle is along the street. The second and third floors have balconies opening onto the courtyard. On the second floor of this long side is a very large room – actually a double room as there are glass doors across the room that could be closed. It’s was labeled “Mother-in-Law’s Room.” Both my colleague and I agreed we could be quite happy in a room like that. The mannequins they had set up in the room were all women and one on-line description I found of the room called it the “harem section.” The same website refers to “men’s quarters” which we didn’t see – or if we did, they weren’t identified as such. But it does hint that even as recently as 1930, even in private homes life was somewhat segregated along gender lines. There was also a living room, in which there were mannequins of both sexes.



In one of the rooms there was a beaten up old motorbike. A short review I found on a travel website claimed that it once belongs to Lawrence of Arabia. Who knows, but it makes a good story. Note that the male mannequin I wearing a traditional fez. Atatürk banned them when he came to power after the First World War.

Perhaps one of the most interesting areas was the cellar, accessed directly from the courtyard. It was hewn out of the bedrock and was significantly cooler. I had obviously been used for food storage and there was even a well down there as well as several jars – each probably about three feet high -- that had been used for storing olive oil. Frankly they reminded me of the jars you see in photos in Biblical archeology books. The were along a wall above a trough and each jar had a little spigot near the bottom. Another item of interest was a very large basis – maybe four feet in diameter and a foot high. It was used for stomping grapes. However, the juice wasn’t used to make wine but rather something similar to our present-day fruit leather.

It was certainly worth a trip out in the rain. And we got our bay leaves as well.