Adana's archaeological museum is one of the ten oldest museums in Türkiye. It was founded in 1924, the year after the republic was declared, and it began in the least museum-like way possible: column capitals and sarcophagi found around the city were gathered at the police headquarters. Under its director Halil Kamil Bey it opened properly in 1928, in the medrese of the Cafer Paşa Mosque at the head of the Taşköprü bridge -- a building that no longer stands.
It has moved repeatedly since. In 1950 it went to the Kuruköprü Monument Museum, which also served for a while as the ethnography museum; it also occupied the Greek church in the same quarter, and there it went by the name Adana Museum. An ethnography section devoted to the Çukurova was added under the director Rıza Yalgan in 1935, and for years the institution was called the Adana Archaeology and Ethnography Museum. Work on a purpose-built museum in Reşatbey began in 1966, and it opened there on 5 January 1972. When that building in turn proved unable to conserve, store and display the collection, the ministry chose an unexpected replacement -- the Milli Mensucat textile mill in Döşeme, Seyhan, one of the first industrial plants Adana ever had. Work started in 2013, and the archaeology museum opened in the restored mill, now the Adana Museum complex, on 18 May 2017, with a good deal more room than any of its earlier homes.
The display runs through eight halls as a continuous account from prehistory to the present, using information panels, images, dioramas and reconstructions rather than cases alone. Stone predominates -- statues, sarcophagi, stelae, altars, busts, inscriptions and architectural fragments -- from the Hittite, Assyrian, Phoenician, Phrygian, Archaic, Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Seljuk and Ottoman periods, alongside terracotta pottery, glass and bronze vessels, lamps, figurines, cylinder and stamp seals, coins and jewellery. The pieces the museum singles out are the stone statue of the storm god Tarhunda, a stele with an Anatolian hieroglyphic inscription, a Babylonian stele, a bronze male figure recovered from the sea, and two Roman sarcophagi -- a marble anthropoid one and the Achilles sarcophagus.
The building deserves a paragraph of its own. The mill was founded in 1906 by Aristidi Kozma Simyonoglu and started work in 1907 as the Simyanoglu Factory; it changed hands in 1924 and became the Milli Fabrika. In 1927, on Atatürk's instructions, Mustafa Özgür, Nuri Has and Seyit Tekin bought it and reorganised it as Milli Mensucat, and its 'Aslan' brand yarn made it known across the country. Hacı Ömer Sabancı became a partner in 1944; economic trouble sent it back to the treasury in 1978, and it started up again in 1983 as Milsan Mensucat.
Visiting hours
- Visiting hours
- 09:00–19:00 (all year)
When to go
- Climate
- Across Adana as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 9.6 °C in January to 28.8 °C in August; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in April, May, October and November; rainfall is heaviest in December (125 mm) and lightest in August (9 mm). Long-term means for 1929-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
