Alaeddin Yavaşça was born in Kilis on 1 March 1926 and died in İstanbul on 23 December 2021. A performer and composer of Turkish classical music, he wrote more than 600 works and trained a great many singers; he was made a State Artist in 1991, received the Presidential Grand Prize for Culture and Art in 2008, and the parliament's Distinguished Service Award in 2010. The ministry calls him the great plane tree of Turkish music.
The museum is the house he was born and grew up in, restored by the ministry to keep his memory, and the house is worth the visit on its own account as an example of traditional Kilis domestic architecture. Its inscription dates it to 1910-11. His father, Hacı Cemil Yavaşça, had the floors brought from Italy, and made two things himself: the carvings on the windows and cupboard doors, and a sundial in the courtyard that tells the exact hour from the shadow of a nail.
It is a two-storey konak, near-square in plan, with wooden ceilings and Italian marble floors, built of the off-white cut stone particular to Kilis. The courtyard is open, with a well and an ornamental pool at its centre and eight rooms around it whose windows look onto it; in all there are 107 square metres of open space. Beside the kitchen on the ground floor is what is known to have been a bath, reached by its own stair and heated from below, and the cellar, stone-built under a cross vault, is where the winter food was kept.
The house was registered as cultural property in 2003, allocated to the ministry in January 2016, and opened as the Alaeddin Yavaşça Museum on 1 March 2022 -- his birthday. The basement covers life in old Kilis: the history of its houses, samples of the materials they were built from, the city's registered monuments, and a short film. The ground floor takes his composing, his years in radio, his family life and childhood, his arrival in İstanbul and his medical training; the first floor holds the music room and covers his concerts, his writing, his poetry and his painting.
The collection runs to 143 objects, and its thread is personal rather than musical in the usual sense: his family life from birth to death, his school years, his medical training, his marriage to his wife Ayten, and the awards he received for his art. Throughout there are information panels, the things he used at work and at home, his books, his awards, photographs, and silicone figures of him.
Visiting hours
- Visiting hours
- 08:30–17:00, closed Monday (all year)
When to go
- Climate
- Across Kilis as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 5.9 °C in January to 28.2 °C in August; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in April, May and October; rainfall is heaviest in December (85 mm) and lightest in July (3 mm). Long-term means for 1959-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
