Guide
The Ümran Baradan Play and Toy Museum stands on the Varyant slope in the Konak district of İzmir and was the first of the municipality's boutique museums. Its foundations were laid in 2004 by the ceramic artist Ümran Baradan, who assembled a collection from toys acquired in countries around the world together with work made by children who won prizes in competitions she organised. On 17 January 2010 Konak Municipality took the collection over, enriched it, and opened it as a museum with the writer Sunay Akın as concept adviser.
The lower floor is given over to display and the upper to events, and more than a thousand objects are held here. Alongside toys dating from the 1800s and the pieces in Ümran Baradan's own international collection are a number of firsts: the first doll with real hair, the Micky mouse that was the inspiration for Mickey Mouse, and the Laterna Magica, ancestor of cinema, as well as doll's houses, cars, soft toys and storybook characters.
Two of the displays come with their own history. The real-haired dolls are there because in the 1920s and 1930s poor families in western countries sold their daughters' hair to toy manufacturers to make a living; the doll in the case, made in the United States in 1930, has hair that is genuinely a woman's. The doll's houses are among the hardest toys to find today. They first appeared in the 16th century in Germany and the Netherlands, where they were not originally toys at all: they decorated the homes of wealthy families and showed how life was lived in the manors of the period, and because their accessories were tiny and thought unsafe for children they were displayed in glass-fronted cabinets.
