Guide
The museum opened on 14 October 2011 inside the Merinos complex, and it calls itself the first and only museum of the textile industry in Türkiye. Its subject is the industrial drive of the Republican period and the birth and growth of textile manufacturing in Bursa, kept for later generations as industrial heritage.
Bursa was suited to it from every direction: its geography and climate, a weaving tradition running back through the Ottoman period, and a skilled workforce already in place.
The Merinos Woollen Weaving Factory was one of the early examples of state-led industrialisation. It opened on 2 February 1938, fifteen years after the founding of the Republic, on 262,000 square metres, and the museum describes it as the most advanced textile plant in the Balkans and the Middle East of its day. Between its opening and its closure it employed 17,500 people.
Set against the economic and social conditions of a country just out of the War of Independence and between two world wars, the factory carried a second significance: it was among the largest employers of women in the country, and brought with it a modern conception of working life.
