In the village of Mustafapaşa near Ürgüp, the Cappadocia Art and History Museum is devoted to kitre dolls, figures modelled from tragacanth gum. Radiye Gül founded it in 2001, and the museum describes it as Türkiye's first kitre doll museum; it has held private museum status under the Ministry of Culture since 2005 and is a member of ICOM.
The dolls are arranged in costumed scenes with their own sets that tell stories from Anatolian history, culture and folk tales. Gül, who has trained in crafts from wood carving and embroidery to felt, marbling, miniature and illumination, makes every costume, set and accessory herself. According to the museum, kitre doll-making was first put on the curriculum of technical schools in the early Republic on Atatürk's initiative and later faded; the museum also runs workshops with schools and universities to keep the craft alive.
Radiye Gül has been working on kitre dolls since 1980, and has held both joint and solo exhibitions in Türkiye and abroad. The museum works with the local authorities, institutions and non-governmental organisations of the region as well as with schools, and lays on thematic tours, workshops in various crafts and events built around the stories the dolls tell for visitors from kindergartens, primary schools and universities. It has also become a stopping place for civic organisations from other provinces working on education, on women, on children and on the environment. The museum describes itself as a place of cultural memory for the making of traditional kitre dolls and for passing them on, and says Gül's effort is to hand the art to later generations without letting it lose its traditional character.
For anyone planning a route, the museum gives the distances by way of Ürgüp: 276 kilometres from Ankara, 764 from İstanbul and 779 from İzmir.
When to go
- Climate
- Across Nevşehir as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from -0.1 °C in January to 21.4 °C in July; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in June, July, August and September; rainfall is heaviest in May (58 mm) and lightest in August (8 mm). Long-term means for 1959-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
