Guide
On Alibey (Cunda) Island off Ayvalık, the Taksiyarhis church has been the home of a Rahmi M. Koç museum since 31 May 2014, when it opened as the first private museum in Ayvalık. The building came to the Rahmi M. Koç Museology and Culture Foundation in May 2012 on a forty-nine-year lease from the directorate general of foundations, and was restored for cultural and artistic use.
Taksiyarhis was the earliest church in Ayvalık, put up in the fifteenth century as a small place of worship and rebuilt on its old foundations in 1873, after which it served as the metropolitan church. It is a domed, rectangular basilica in the neoclassical manner that dominated the architecture of its day, its rubble-built walls faced in the local sarımsak stone quarried nearby; the four piers are of brick under lime plaster and gypsum, and the interior is painted with icons of saints, figures of the apostles, and plant and geometric motifs.
The building's later history is legible in its fabric. It was converted into a mosque without a minaret in 1927–28, then used for a long stretch as a tobacco monopoly depot; the earthquake of 1944 damaged it badly, and illegal digging by treasure hunters, along with weather, wrecked much of what was left. What is shown inside today draws on the inventories of the Rahmi M. Koç museums in İstanbul and Ankara and runs from tin toys and steam-driven mechanical models to prams and instruments for measuring time.
