Guide
Visitors to the İbrahim Müteferrika Paper Museum can leave having made a sheet of paper themselves. That is the point of the place: the municipal museum in Yalova, which describes itself as the first paper museum in Türkiye, runs production workshops alongside its displays, and paper is made there by traditional methods with entirely natural materials under the name Yalova Kağıdı.
The name over the door is local history rather than borrowed prestige. The first Ottoman paper mill whose existence can be proved from official documents was set up at Elmalık, a village of Yalova, and it was run by İbrahim Müteferrika, the first Turkish printer. It was known as Kağıthane-i Yalakabad. Paper at that time was an entirely imported product, and the museum's account rests the mill's importance on that — it made the stuff with domestic means, and it is the first documented instance of paper production in the Ottoman state.
The exhibition itself is panel-based and works through the subject in stages: the history of paper and how it is made, how paper is conserved, the arts made from it, the relationship between the Turks and paper, the paper industry, and the history of the book and of librarianship.
The scale of the workshops can be read from the museum's own figures for 2025. It received 57,420 visitors over that year, and 14,000 people — 11,000 from Türkiye and 3,000 from abroad — made their own paper in its workshops. The museum puts at roughly a million the number of people reached with Yalova Kağıdı through festivals and events attended in other cities during the same year. It also says it is supported by the staff of paper museums elsewhere in the world and advised voluntarily by hundreds of scholars, and that its document library is taking it towards becoming a specialist centre in the history of papermaking.
