The first sight to see in Gaziantep is the Zeugma Mosaic Museum, which holds the floors and wall paintings lifted from a Roman city on the Euphrates before the Birecik dam flooded part of it. In the centre stand the round castle on its hill and, in the old quarters, hans, mosques and courtyard houses, many of them now small museums: of the city's defence, of toys, of the bath, of its cooking and of the pistachio. Out in the province lie the excavated site of Zeugma itself, the river fortress of Rumkale, the sculpture workshop of Hittite times at Yesemek, the mounds of Zincirli and Tilmen, and the ruins of Karkamış on the Syrian border. Every one of them has a page of its own here.
The Zeugma Mosaic Museum
The museum opened in 2011. Before that the Zeugma mosaics had been on show in the Gaziantep Archaeological Museum, until there was no longer room for them. The collection is measured by area: 2,748 square metres of mosaic from the Roman and Late Antique city and 140 square metres of wall painting, along with a bronze Mars, four limestone statues, twenty columns, four fountains of Roman date, sarcophagi, grave stelae and pieces of buildings.
The arrangement follows the ancient town, not a timeline. Floors from the ground nearest the river are the first you see, and the displays rise through the building the way Zeugma's terraces rose from the water, with the walls of the houses reconstructed around their mosaics. A second section holds church mosaics of the fifth and sixth centuries; the third part of the building is offices and a conference hall. It is a large museum, so give it time.
Zeugma itself and the Archaeological Museum
The name means a crossing or a bridge. Around 300 BC Seleucus I Nicator founded Seleuceia on the Euphrates at the place where Alexander had crossed, built a second town, Apamea, for his wife on the far bank and linked the two with a bridge; Rome took the place in 31 BC and called it Zeugma. Under the early emperors it held a legion and guarded Rome's eastern border; in AD 256 the Sasanian king Shapur I burned it, and it never recovered. The ministry puts the mosaics of its second- and third-century villas among the finest anywhere, credits the clay seal impressions found here with a world record, and says its two Commagene temples have no match elsewhere. When it was known that the Birecik dam would drown all of Apamea and part of Seleuceia, a rescue excavation lifted the floors and frescoes, finishing in 2000. The site, on hills ten kilometres east of Nizip that locals call Belkıs, was put on UNESCO's Tentative List for World Heritage in 2012.
The Gaziantep Archaeological Museum on İstasyon Avenue grew out of work that Sabahat Göğüş, among the earliest archaeologists of the republican era, began in 1944, and opened in 1969. After the Zeugma mosaics left, it was redesigned and reopened on 18 May 2017, with the displays climbing floor by floor in date order from the Lower Palaeolithic to the republic. Look for the bones of the extinct Maraş elephant, Late Hittite finds and material from Carchemish.
The castle, the hans and the Culture Road
Gaziantep Castle sits on a hill in the middle of the city. Its building date is unknown, but it is known to have served as a lookout in the Hittite period; it is a ring of stone walls 1,200 metres round with twelve towers and bastions, and a restoration in the early 2000s gave it the shape it has now. Immediately south of it is the Emine Göğüş Cuisine Museum, described further down.
The castle marks the northern edge of the Millet Han, which began in 1575 as a covered market, the Keçeciler bedesten, while Lala Mustafa Pasha governed Antep, and only gained its upper floor in 1890. Known before the republic as the Aziziye, it got its present name during Atatürk's visit: when people wanted to call it after him, he said it should belong to the nation, and Millet Han it became. Handicraft shops fill it today, and it is one of the main stops on the Culture Road, the Kültür Yolu. The same governor built the Paşa Hamamı in 1577, now the Bath Museum: Antep baths lie below street level, so the visit goes down steps into the cold, warm and hot rooms, and the hot room has a gulleytin, a mikveh pool in which people of the Jewish faith sought ritual cleansing. Wax figures act out bath customs, from the bride's bath to the new mother's.
Other hans are close by. The Anadolu Han, thought to date from the early nineteenth century, has been the carpet sellers' market since its restoration in 1985. Yeni Han on Uzun Çarşı, put up some time between 1757 and 1785 in black and yellowish stone, has a cave on its entrance floor, once a quarry and then a stable, now a cool place to rest along the Culture Road. The Tahmis coffee house of 1638 was founded to support the Mevlevi lodge; a story told locally, and only as tradition, has Murad IV stopping here for coffee on his way to Baghdad. Fire destroyed it between 1901 and 1903, and the lodge's sheikh paid to rebuild it along with a han and 33 shops. Bayazhan, a han of 1909 on Atatürk Bulvarı, has been the city museum since 2009 and works well as a first stop: it covers history and food, and figures demonstrate local crafts: kutnu weaving, copperwork, inlay with mother-of-pearl.
The seventeenth-century Mevlevi lodge, inside the Tekke Camii complex, is now the Mevlevi Culture and Foundation Works Museum, with metalwork, handwritten Qur'ans, calligraphy, kilims and carpets; in the last century the building also served as a primary school, a depot and a mufti's office. Among the old mosques, Kozanlı appears in court registers of 1647 and 1654 and has a short, thick, twisted minaret, and Kozluca keeps its minaret inside the building. The synagogue, the Havra in the Düğmeci quarter, is recorded as built in 1886 and has been restored. The Islamic Science History Museum shows working models of instruments from astronomy, mechanics and medicine and lets you smell rose, amber and aloeswood scents made by the old methods. On Akkent square stands the Şahinbey Millet Mosque, opened in 2024, with six minarets and a main dome ringed by 125 smaller ones.
The Bey quarter and its house museums
The old Antep house looks inward. It turns blank walls to the street and opens onto a courtyard the locals call the hayat, life, with flower beds, a well and a small pool, the ganne; latticed windows on the upper floor carry a little opening above each one, the kuş tağası, for air. Several such houses in the Bey quarter are now museums. The Atatürk Memorial Museum, opened in 2013 in a house of the Konukoğlu family, recalls 26 January 1933, when Atatürk was entered on the quarter's population register and made an honorary citizen. The Game and Toy Museum, founded with Sunay Akın as curator and open since 6 April 2013, spreads handmade toys from between 1700 and 1990 and first-run figures from films and cartoons through eight galleries, with pieces from Germany, Japan, Argentina and elsewhere. The Hasan Süzer Ethnography Museum, which opened on 9 May 2026, walks through a Gaziantep marriage room by room, from a cave in the bedrock cellar up to the trousseau on the top floor. The Ali İhsan Göğüş Museum, opened in 2014, remembers one of the country's first tourism ministers.
The defence of Antep
The city earned the title Gazi for resisting British and French occupation, and several sights tell that story. The National Struggle Museum on Şehitler Caddesi starts in a twelve-room building and continues underground in caves, with mechatronic figures, projections and the pistols, hunting guns, picks and cleavers the townspeople fought with. The 25 Aralık museum is built around a painted panorama 120 metres long and 13 high, ringed by three dioramas and fourteen oil paintings; many objects were given by families of the dead and wounded. In the Bey quarter, the Antep Defence Martyrs' Cemetery and Respect Museum, opened on 25 December 2023, stands in the burial ground itself and remembers 6,317 people who died. Bullet marks are still visible on the Ali Nacar Mosque by the Alleben stream. Outside town, on the road to Kilis, a nature park stands close to the Elmalı bridge, where Şahin Bey fell on 28 March 1920, and to the Dokurcum mill, where on the same day French troops caught and killed fourteen children who had been bringing food to his men.
Food, in the museums
Gaziantep joined the UNESCO Creative Cities Network for gastronomy in 2016, and the municipality and the ministry both say no other cuisine in the world is named after its city. The municipality calls the Emine Göğüş Cuisine Museum, opened in 2008 in a mansion of 1904, the first culinary museum founded in Türkiye. It shows a working kitchen rather than recipes: the tools and pots, the stringing and drying of vegetables on the roofs, pepper paste, pickles and the lahmacun shared at the end of the work. The Pistachio Museum, opened on 21 September 2018 in a building shaped like the nut, shows all ten pistachio varieties grown in Gaziantep and the harvest in moving figures. The Udma Cheese Museum fills a restored bath and opened in 2022 at the fourth GastroAntep festival. The Kayna Soap and Molasses Museum, an old works in the Türktepe neighbourhood, keeps its olive mill, oil pools and the cauldrons for soap and for grape molasses.
Further out: Dülük, Rumkale, Yesemek and the mounds
Dülük, ten kilometres north of the city, has traces of settlement 600,000 years old, rock-cut chamber tombs and a temple of Mithras dug in 1997–98 with the University of Münster, which the ministry's Culture Portal calls the first underground Mithras temple found in Anatolia. The Dülükbaba nature park, also at Dülük, is on city bus routes; in the city itself the 100th Anniversary Atatürk Culture Park follows the Alleben stream, and Alleben-Yamaçtepe offers picnics under red pine.
Rumkale, in Yavuzeli, rises on a cliff where the Merzimen stream joins the Euphrates and is reached only by boat, from Kasaba village or from Halfeti. Within the walls you can pick out cisterns, a monastery, Barşavma, and the church of St Nerses, and tradition says the apostle John copied the Gospel here. Yesemek, some twenty-two kilometres from İslahiye to the south-east, was a quarry and sculpture workshop, by the ministry's account the largest in the Near East in its time; work stopped when the Assyrians carried off its masters, and the more than three hundred pieces set out on the site, gate lions above all, show the stone at every stage from rough block to near-finished. It too joined the Tentative List in 2012.
Near İslahiye are two mounds. Zincirli was Sam'al, a Late Hittite and then Aramaean royal city whose identity was settled by an inscription of Esarhaddon; many of its sculptures went to Berlin in the excavations of 1888 to 1902. Tilmen, ringed by branches of the Karasu, has walls of unmortared stone, an eastern gate where two basalt lions were found, and a palace compared with that of Alalakh. On the Euphrates at the Syrian border, Karkamış was dug by the British Museum, with Woolley and Lawrence among the team; its Late Hittite reliefs show the goddess Kubaba and her procession. Smaller sights include two monumental tombs of the second and third centuries AD in Araban, the one at Elif carrying a row of Medusa heads. For walkers, the Hızır plateau sits at about 1,300 metres in the Amanos mountains, and the forests of Huzurlu shelter beech, yew and box at the southern edge of their range.
