Guide
The museum sits in the Göğüş mansion, just south of Gaziantep Castle. The house was built in 1904 and is the birthplace of Ali İhsan Göğüş, one of Türkiye's first ministers of tourism. The metropolitan municipality restored it and opened it as a museum in 2008.
What it holds is the history of a kitchen. Gaziantep has been under many rulers over a long span and the ministry's portal treats that layering as the reason its cooking is what it is: the care taken over ingredients, the spices, the pastes and the sauces.
The displays follow food as a shared, seasonal labour rather than as restaurant cooking — the neighbourhood work of hollowing vegetables for winter, the red and green strings of drying produce over the roofs, peppers ground for household paste, jars of pickles, and the lahmacun eaten together at the end of a day's work.
Gaziantep joined the UNESCO Creative Cities Network in the field of gastronomy in 2016. The city's claim — that it is the only cuisine in the world known by the name of its city — is the portal's own and is reproduced here as such.
