Guide
The İzmir Women's Museum opened on 23 January 2014, founded under the women and family services unit of the Konak municipality while Hakan Tartan was district mayor. It is, according to Turkish Wikipedia, the first women's museum in Türkiye to have premises of its own.
It stands in Tilkilik, in the Basmane quarter, in a district where Jews and Turks lived side by side into the first half of the twentieth century. The building is one of the notable houses of that quarter, designed in a neoclassical manner that brings European and traditional Turkish architecture together.
The municipality states the purpose plainly: to remind the world of the forgotten past and the strength of the women of Anatolia, and to bring their creativity to light. The museum is built around that idea and sets out to tell both the history and the struggle.
The display runs over three floors and thirteen rooms. On the entrance floor are nineteenth-century garments — a kaftan embroidered with gold thread, a bindallı, cepkens — together with the rooms called Women from the Past to the Present and Women in Anatolia in Antiquity, the video art rooms, the library and the garden. The upper floor holds the rooms called Protest and Women, Leading Women, the collection room of Ottoman and republican objects, documents and works, the installation room and the hall for temporary exhibitions. Workshop, archive, store and office rooms complete the building.
Among the things shown are copies of paintings with female figures by artists such as Osman Hamdi Bey and Leonardo da Vinci, women's magazines published in the Ottoman period and in the republic, documents of local history, a reproduction of the Gypsy Girl mosaic, portraits of women of İzmir made at the Pervin Özdemir ceramics workshop, the dress of Anatolian women, news reports of women's actions in Türkiye, and biographical panels on twenty-four women, among them Nezihe Muhittin, Semiha Berksoy, Bahriye Üçok and Türkan Saylan. The special exhibition collection holds clothing that belonged to figures such as Keriman Halis Ece and Süreyya Ağaoğlu.
Those who come are chiefly middle school, high school and university students, along with visitors from Türkiye and abroad, and the museum is a partner of the International Association of Women's Museums. The judgement is not unanimous: according to Gül Aydın, no feminist purpose was pursued in founding it, the woman's point of view remained limited, and the political reflections in it are markedly strong.
The museum is at 1298. Sokak No 14, Akıncı, Konak.
