Guide
The Karagöz Museum in Bursa is, according to Turkish Wikipedia, the first museum in Türkiye devoted to Karagöz, the Turkish shadow play. It was set up by the Bursa metropolitan municipality and stands directly opposite the monumental tomb of Karagöz and Hacivat on Çekirge Avenue.
The museum occupies a former transformer building. On show are Karagöz figures, objects and documents belonging to the culture of the shadow play, and puppet figures from other cultures. The two-storey building served as a transformer station for some thirty years, was turned into an arts house under the name Karagöz House in 1997, and was refitted as a museum in 2007.
Besides the display areas the museum holds a workshop for performing Karagöz with room for five students, a specialist library used by people researching the shadow play, and a performance hall seating sixty-nine. In all it covers 1,008 square metres.
The work began after the third International Bursa Karagöz Festival in November 1995, when the municipality set out to turn the disused transformer building opposite the Karagöz monument into a place where the art could be kept alive. The building was laid out as an arts house with the help of the Bursa branch of UNIMA, the international union of puppetry and shadow play, and of the collector and shadow puppeteer Şinasi Çelikkol. It opened on 10 June 1997, and Karagöz performances were given three days a week.
The building was assigned to the Bursa Culture, Art and Tourism Foundation on 10 September 1997. Weaving, handicrafts and clothing from the Keles region and from nomad communities, all from Şinasi Çelikkol's collection, were shown here too, and one room served as the UNIMA office.
For ten years the building carried the name Karagöz House. Courses were held there at various times on performing the play and on making the figures, and between 1997 and 2005 it was one of the main venues of the International Bursa Puppet and Shadow Play Festival. In 2005 the display of regional clothing was taken out and special cases were made for showing the shadow play figures, while the outside of the building was faced with relief ceramic figures of the Karagöz characters. The building was cleared in 2006 and the work of turning it into a museum began.
The first pieces to enter the museum collection were seventy-two characters from the collection of Metin And. Figures belonging to Karagöz artists were added later — among them Osman Ezgi and Metin Özlen, Mustafa Mutlu and Orhan Kurt, Riaf Kaplanoğlu and Tacettin Diker — and the municipality rebuilt the Çekirge Avenue building in 2007 to display what had been gathered.
