Guide
The Ankara Museum of Foundation Works, known for short as AVEM, is in the Altındağ district of Ankara and opened to visitors on 7 May 2007. It is supervised by the Directorate of the Ethnography Museum.
The building is plain-fronted, without traditional ornament or architectural elements, built in 1927 in the manner of the First National Architecture period. It served as the School of Law between 1928 and 1941, later for a time as the Ankara Girls' Art School and as a hall of residence for female students under the Higher Education Foundation, and was finally rented by the Ankara mufti's office, whose building it remained until 2004. Vacated in April 2004, it was taken over by the General Directorate of Foundations for use as a museum, restored, and opened under its present name.
The collection is made up of pieces gathered from every region of Türkiye and kept for years in the stores of the General Directorate of Foundations: carpets and kilims, candlesticks, purses, Qur'ans, sultans' foundation deeds, clocks, calligraphic panels, tiles, metalwork and manuscripts. Among the rarer works are the thirteenth-century wooden window shutters and preaching pulpits of the Ahi Evran Mosque, and the door leaves and wooden panels of the Great Mosque of Divriği. Some pieces smuggled abroad in earlier years have been brought back and put on display here.
Visit status for this record: open to visitors.
