Guide
The Kayna Soap and Molasses Museum in Gaziantep's Türktepe neighbourhood is an old soap works that its last owners, the Pekmezci family, used for lentils, soap and grape molasses before donating it to the metropolitan municipality. The municipality's Soap Han project won an implementation award in 2020 in the Union of Historic Towns' heritage competition; restoration by the conservation office began in 2021 and was finished at the end of 2023.
The building has two courtyards and two storeys, with production on the ground floor and display and drying above; you reach the han by passing under a kabaltı, a covered passage bridging two houses. In the front courtyard a hand-cut limestone cave holds olive-oil wells and buried storage jars. The second courtyard has the stone mill where olives were crushed, settling pools for the oil, a stone and an iron soap cauldron, and the cauldron and tools used for molasses. Upstairs is the pouring floor where boiled soap was finished. Visitors are asked to stay on the marked route and keep their voices down, as sound carries in the cave.
