Guide
The toy museum of Ankara University opened on 20 April 1990 within the university, on the initiative of the educationist Professor Bekir Onur. Its purpose is to preserve toys that stand at risk of disappearing amid the rapid change in Turkish life. It was registered as a trademark under the name Ankara Toy Museum by the Turkish patent office on 18 October 2020, and it works under the oversight of the directorate of the Ethnography Museum.
The museum stands on the university's Tandoğan campus and has held thousands of toys, made in Türkiye and abroad, since it was founded. Its collection came out of Professor Onur's research into play and toys in Anatolia. Close to five thousand toys are recorded in the inventory, arranged around fourteen themes, with traditional toys foremost among them.
Some 1,200 pieces are on display, chiefly traditional Turkish toys but including a good many foreign ones. The pieces in the collection serve research into the history of industry, of culture, of education and of childhood. What sets the collection apart is the room it gives to the products of the important names in the Turkish toy industry.
The traditional toys are largely local, seasonal and handmade, tied closely to particular games: kites, catapults, hoops, spinning tops, rag dolls, cradles and baby walkers.
The foreign toys are those brought from other countries for personal or commercial reasons, and the oldest pieces in the museum belong to this group. The source names a market stall figure set of 1870 as the oldest group of toys, gives 1890 as the date of the oldest pieces in the foreign group, and elsewhere mentions German-made toys of 1840.
