The Hasankeyf Museum was built to hold what the rescue excavations produced. Those digs were carried out on important historic sites -- mounds among them -- affected by the Ilısu dam, and the museum in the new settlement area of Hasankeyf was designed to suit the town's own architecture.
Construction began in 2012 on a complex that includes the museum building, entrance structures, an open-air theatre with its backstage building, a greenhouse, a park, and the landscaping around them; the provisional handover was in June 2015 and the final one in March 2019. The museum operated at first as a branch of the Batman Museum Directorate and was established as the Hasankeyf Museum Directorate in May 2019, beginning work that December. The site covers about 102,668 square metres, including an archaeopark.
The collection is broad: plant fossils and geomorphological material, archaeological and ethnographic objects, coins, tablets, seals and seal impressions, architectural elements including a portal and a dome interior, and stone works. It was assembled from objects transferred from the Batman, Diyarbakır and Mardin museums, from rescue excavations in Batman, Diyarbakır, Siirt and Mardin beyond Hasankeyf itself, and from purchases and donations.
The display is built to be used rather than only looked at, with computer-supported exhibits, touchscreens, interactive systems and a simulator.
One hall here is not about Hasankeyf's excavations at all. A science centre room has been opened for El-Cezerî, who lived in this region between 1136 and 1206 and whom the museum calls the greatest genius of the field of cybernetics, a physicist and a master of automata and matrices with an important place in the world literature; his inventions are displayed in it.
The rest of the display is chronological. The two-storey exhibition hall is divided into fourteen rooms according to the objects in them, and what stands out in the collection is the sheer quantity of movable and immovable cultural property from two periods in particular: Hasankeyf and the country around it were important centres under the Ayyubids and the Artuqids. The museum was founded with the aim of becoming the regional museum for the Ilısu dam and hydroelectric project, and its establishment answered a target set in the Third National Culture Council action plan of 2017, that new museums be founded in provinces without one, in proportion to their potential in cultural property.
Visiting hours
- Visiting hours
- Summer (8 May – 1 September) 09:00–18:00, closed Monday · Winter (1 September – 1 May) 08:30–17:00, closed Monday
When to go
- Climate
- Across Batman as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 2.6 °C in January to 30.3 °C in July; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in May, September and October; rainfall is heaviest in March (76 mm) and lightest in July (2 mm). Long-term means for 1952-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
