Guide
The İstanbul tulip foundation runs this place as a museum and research centre at once, and the second half of that description is not decorative. The foundation's stated purpose is to spread tulip growing across Turkey, to research and propagate the varieties, to make them better known at home and abroad, to improve production and to protect the flower — and, separately, to research what the tulip has meant in Turkish cultural and artistic life and to put the scholarship on that subject on display.
The argument the foundation wants to make abroad is a historical one: that the tulip is a Turkish flower, carried from Central Asia to Anatolia, grown in gardens there from the sixteenth century onward, cultivated in the Ottoman period both in the palace gardens of İstanbul and by ordinary people, and taken from Anatolia to Europe rather than the other way about. Alongside that it works to identify the endemic tulips of Anatolia and of İstanbul in particular, to register them and to have them recognised internationally, and it trains growers in bulb production.
For a visitor the building holds permanent and temporary galleries, a photography gallery, open-air display areas, a meeting and conference hall, a library, teaching areas where the work is done hands-on, a gift counter and a cafeteria.
