Guide
The Kenan Yavuz Ethnography Museum is in the village of Beşpınar, once called Loru, in the Demirözü district of Bayburt. It stands in the Demirözü valley forty kilometres from Bayburt, near the reservoir there.
The museum covers eight thousand square metres and was built to sit within the architecture of the region, every structure on the site tied to its place and time. The stone and timber used came from ruined houses in the surrounding villages and from the mountains around.
It was set up to draw attention to what modernisation and migration have done to village architecture. Its stated purpose is to preserve local things that are being forgotten and to pass the cultural inheritance on to coming generations through living images, with the people themselves at the centre.
To keep the local culture alive the museum runs children's games, storytelling, presentations of endemic plants, the local tradition of the ağız barı, and wedding and henna customs, along with activities carried out in the old communal manner. Those held in the summer of 2020 included festivals of mowing with the scythe, of the tandır oven, of threshing, of spinning and of making bulgur, and the plan is to widen and continue them in later years.
What is displayed are objects that belonged to real people and the stories attached to them. As visitor interest has grown, so has the attention and curiosity of the people of the surrounding country towards their own culture.
The founder is Kenan Yavuz, a businessman who served for a time as chief executive of companies in Türkiye. He established the place as a culture house in 2013, and in 2019 it formally gained the status of a private museum. In 2021 the European Museum Forum awarded it the Silletto Prize.
