Guide
The Karadeniz Ereğli Museum has served since 1998 in the historic Halil Pasha mansion as a museum of archaeology and ethnography under the Ministry of Culture and Tourism.
The mansion was built at the end of the nineteenth century, in the reign of Abdülhamid II, by Halil Pasha Karamahmutoğlu, a provincial governor, on the foundations of an old church. 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.
On the ground floor are glass vessels, marble grave stelae, column capitals, sarcophagi, grave stelae and jewellery of the Greek, Roman and Byzantine periods, along with finds from the ancient city of Filyos and from the excavations at Yassıkaya and the İnönü cave. Coin collections of the Roman, Byzantine, Umayyad, Abbasid, Artuqid, Sasanian, Seljuk and Ottoman periods are shown here as well.
The first floor holds terracotta amphorae and Hittite, Byzantine and Ottoman seals. The second floor shows regional dress, the tools used in weaving elpek cloth, kitchen utensils, weapons, prayer beads and clocks. The third floor is laid out as a house museum. In the garden are gravestones, column shafts and capitals and grave stelae of various periods.
The grave monument in the garden, 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.
