The museum sits inside the Şeyh Ali Semerkandi complex in Çamlıdere, north-west of Ankara, and it reconstructs one moment: the town as it was in the fifteenth century, when Şeyh Ali Semerkandi came to it.
The method is staging rather than cases. Wax figures fill out the trades of the period — the yoghurt seller, the street hawker, the street barber, the carpenter, the quilt-maker, the packsaddler — each in a scene built around the details of ordinary life. At the centre of the museum is a country coffee house, standing for where people of the time rested and talked.
It is at Yeni Mahalle, in the Şeyh Ali Semerkandi complex.
Visiting hours
- Visiting hours
- 08:00 - 17:00
When to go
- Climate
- Across Ankara as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 0.4 °C in January to 23.6 °C in August; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in May, June, July, August and September; rainfall is heaviest in May (52 mm) and lightest in August (13 mm). Long-term means for 1927-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
