The museum of Karadeniz Ereğli occupies Halil Paşa Konağı, a three-storey late nineteenth-century mansion in the middle of the town, at Orhanlar Mahallesi, Yalı Caddesi No 96, Meydanbaşı, and has served since 1998 as a museum of archaeology and ethnography under the Ministry of Culture and Tourism.
The mansion was built in the reign of Abdülhamid II for Halil Paşa Karamahmutoğlu, sanjak governor, on the foundations of an old church, and ancient pieces gathered from Roman buildings were used in the ornament of its face. The house served for a time as a middle school and a girls' vocational high school, then stood neglected for many years, and after a restoration lasting about ten years it opened as a museum in 1998.
The ground floor holds the archaeology: marble grave stelae, figured marble column capitals, sarcophagi, glass vessels, jewellery, metalwork, lamps and figurines of the Greek, Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine periods, collected from Ereğli and its surroundings, along with finds from the ancient city of Filyos and from the excavations at Yassıkaya and the İnönü cave. The first floor shows terracotta amphorae. The coin collections run from Lydian, Greek, Roman and Byzantine issues through Umayyad, Abbasid, Sasanian, Artuqid, Seljuk and Ottoman ones, and there are Hittite, Byzantine and Ottoman seals.
The second floor is ethnographic and local. Men's and women's costume is shown alongside elpek, a cloth woven only in this district, with its thread and the looms and tools used to make it, and then handkerchiefs, wrapping cloths and covers, weapons, smoking equipment, prayer beads, clocks, kitchen ware, weights and measures, and manuscripts. The third floor is furnished as an Ottoman house — sitting room, guest room, everyday room and bedroom, in that order.
The garden is part of the display rather than an approach to it: column capitals, shafts and bases, architectural fragments, gravestones, grave stelae and sarcophagi of the Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Seljuk and Ottoman periods stand there. The grave monument among them, thought to have been set up in the second or third century, is an example of the altar-shaped monuments raised in Roman times to hold the ashes of the dead or to commemorate them. It carries nineteen lines of ancient Greek, from which it appears that the monument belonged to Krispos, a citizen of the Roman province of Egypt.
Krispos was a pantomime artist who travelled from city to city. He won a prize at the first rhythmic tragedy competition to be held, but died unexpectedly at Herakleia Pontike at the age of twenty-nine. The monument raised in his memory stands 2.20 metres high and measures 0.80 metres across at the top and 0.70 at the base. It was found on the road running from Prusias ad Hypium, today Konuralp in Düzce, to Ereğli, and was brought to the museum garden.
When to go
- Climate
- Across Zonguldak as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 6.3 °C in January to 22.1 °C in August; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in May, June, July, August, September and October; rainfall is heaviest in December (154 mm) and lightest in May (55 mm). Long-term means for 1938-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
Visiting hours
- Hours
- 08:30 - 19:00, closed Monday
Getting there
- Access
- In the centre of Karadeniz Ereğli.
