Guide
The Bursa Forestry Museum is, according to Turkish Wikipedia, the first forestry museum in Türkiye, gathering and displaying everything living and lifeless that belongs to the forest and to forestry. It stands on Çekirge Caddesi in Bursa, in the building known as the Saatçi Köşkü, and was founded by Zafer Öztaptık.
About two thousand objects are shown: animal and plant fossils, instruments of communication and forest engineering, maps and photographs, and documents on the history of forestry. Among them are fossils of sequoias — trees that grow today only in America — which grew in Anatolia and have survived here in fossil form, and a sixteen-million-year-old animal fossil found in the coal workings of the Orhaneli district.
The building is one of the important works of domestic architecture in Bursa: a nineteenth-century two-storey timber house in the Ottoman baroque manner, with wide terraces, an arbour in the garden and a pool with a lion's-head spout. It belonged to Ali Efendi, one of the notables of Bursa, and a clockmaker known as Saatçi Efendi made clocks in it for many years — hence its name. It was lived in as a house until 1936, then used as the Bursa Forestry School until the school closed in 1949, and served as the regional forestry directorate until 1983. It was converted into a museum in 1989 and opened on 29 March that year.
