Guide
The Mustafa Erim Museum of City History is in the Akdeniz district of Mersin, in a nineteenth-century house that is itself an example of the city's domestic architecture. Mustafa Erim restored the building and arranged the displays inside it, and it opened in 2010 as a private museum, registered as such.
Its subject is Mersin itself. The section given to city history is laid out so that walking through it feels like walking around Mersin in the first half of the twentieth century, with the commercial and social centres of the city set out in photographs and plans. A separate part goes much further back, to the Yumuktepe mound, excavated from the 1930s, and sets out in detail the periods identified there and what was found.
The rooms that follow are built out of documents. The education history room holds material gathered from around seventy primary schools that taught in Mersin between 1881 and 1940 — diplomas, textbooks and teaching aids of the period, photographs, teachers' registers, pupils' reports and correspondence. Another corner covers the liberation of the city: the Defence of Rights associations, the Kuvayi Milliye figures, the detachment commanders and others who took part.
There is a section on Atatürk's visits to Mersin, recounted in order from 1918 to 1938 and illustrated with photographs, and another on people who were born, lived or left their mark here, with biographies of many who contributed to the city culturally, artistically or politically. The castles, mosques and churches of Mersin are introduced across several further sections.
