Guide
The Pera Museum opened on 8 June 2005 in Tepebaşı, set up by the Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation as part of a wider cultural undertaking and meant to work as a cultural centre as much as a museum.
It occupies two joined buildings. One is the Bristol Hotel, built in brick and masonry in 1893 to a neoclassical design by the architect Achilleas Manussos, which took foreign guests until the early 1980s; the other is the five-storey residential block next door. The restoration architect Sinan Genim drew up the project that brought them together between 2003 and 2005.
Three collections of the foundation form the permanent holdings: Orientalist painting, Anatolian weights and measures, and Kütahya tiles and ceramics. Around them the museum runs exhibitions, talks, education programmes, scholarly work and its own publishing.
The hotel changed hands several times before the museum. After the death of its last owner in 1983 the heirs put it up for sale; it passed first to a rubber company and then to a bank, which used it as a head office before the building returned to public use.
