A museum about floods was announced for Trabzon in August 2019, and the reason it was put there rather than anywhere else is in the rainfall. The Eastern Black Sea is the wettest part of Türkiye and carries, by the ministry's count, some 74,000 separate streams. The Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry presented the project as the first flood museum in the world, and set it up through the General Directorate of State Hydraulic Works (DSİ) with the stated aim of drawing attention to flooding and making the public aware of it.
The site named for it was the DSİ 22nd Regional Directorate in Trabzon, and the plan described is a hands-on one rather than a display of objects: activity areas, simulations and experimental sets built around three questions — how not to cause a flood, how to protect yourself from one, and how to behave while one is happening — alongside sections introducing the innovative flood control works that have come into use around the world in recent years.
The contents listed in the announcement give the shape of it: a hydraulic model of a permeable check dam, examples of innovative and classic flood and sediment control structures, interactive models of a river flood and of a city flood, a model showing how landslides and floods act on each other, a scale model of the 1929 Of landslide and flood, a cinema hall, a room for the flood emergency response team, a virtual reality flood room, a technical information section, a section on historic floods, a section on behaviour during a flood, and a flood early warning simulator. A touch-screen map was to let visitors check whether their own house stands under flood threat.
When to go
- Climate
- Across Trabzon as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 7.3 °C in February to 23.5 °C in August; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in May, June, July, August, September and October; rainfall is heaviest in October (113 mm) and lightest in July (37 mm). Long-term means for 1927-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
