Tokat's museum began in 1926 in the Gökmedrese, a Seljuk medical medrese, and outgrew it. The stores filled, the objects needed better conditions, new acquisitions needed modern display and the building itself needed restoration, so on 3 March 2012 the museum moved to the Arastalı Bedesten, an Ottoman building on the historic Sulusokak in the centre of town. It opened there on 18 September 2012.
Who built the bedesten and when is not known; what survives, read together with the historical sources, points to the fifteenth or sixteenth century. It is built of cut stone, the façade broken up by courses of brick, on a nearly square plan running north to south, with a round-arched door projecting from each of those two ends. Inside, three rows of three piers divide the space, carried under nine round domes, and small windows light it — one below and three above at each end. Two long narrow arcades run down either side, each with its own doors and a small dome over the middle of the row of shops.
A bedesten is a covered and guarded market built for valuable cloth, jewellery and the like. In their day these were serious economic institutions, doing work that banks and exchanges do now.
The archaeological collection is displayed in the bedesten proper. The sequence opens with the finds from Turhal Ulutepe, excavated by the museum in 1976, which carry Tokat's chronology back to the Late Chalcolithic, and continues with Maşathöyük in the Zile district, excavated by Tahsin Özgüç between 1973 and 1984, where the remains of a Hittite administrative and military palace were uncovered. A bronze statue group found at Ağılcık village near Zile stands among the Roman material, alongside jewellery, burial urns, terracotta jars, lamps, glass, and crosses and seals of the Eastern Roman period.
Getting there
- Access
- The bedesten is in the centre of Tokat, within walking distance of Cumhuriyet Square.
When to go
- Climate
- Across Tokat as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 2 °C in January to 22.5 °C in August; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in May, June, July, August and September; rainfall is heaviest in May (59 mm) and lightest in August (9 mm). Long-term means for 1929-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
