The Meerschaum Museum — Lületaşı Müzesi — is in the Odunpazarı district of Eskişehir, inside the urban conservation area, and it was opened by Odunpazarı Municipality in 2008 in the Kurşunlu complex.
The reason it is here and nowhere else: according to the Culture Portal, Eskişehir is the only region in the world where white meerschaum is mined. The stone has become the city's emblem and is also called 'Eskişehir stone'; elsewhere it goes by sea foam, Meerschaum, magnesite and sepiolite.
The museum also keeps the story the city tells about how the stone was found. In it a young man resting on his way between villages sees a mole pushing a white stone out of its hole and playing with it; when he reaches for it the mole bolts underground, and the young man is left turning the stone in his fingers — the first person, so the tale goes, to take a knife to it.
When to go
- Climate
- Across Eskişehir as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 0.2 °C in January to 22.1 °C in August; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in June, July, August and September; rainfall is heaviest in April (44 mm) and lightest in August (11 mm). Long-term means for 1991-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
