This is the museum to start with in Mardin, because it explains the town before you walk into it. The upper floor sets out how Mardin was made and how it was lived in: the handicrafts the town lived by — jewellery, copperwork, weaving, soapmaking and stone carving — alongside the objects used in its houses, its villages and its places of worship, the clothes people wore, and finds from the city's history. Photographs, information panels, audio and visual material and reconstructed scenes carry the daily life, and a group of gravestones belonging to the different faiths settled here makes the multi-religious character of the place concrete rather than asserted. Examples of the books published about Mardin can be found here too.
For people from Mardin the collection works differently, as a place to recover a version of the city they grew up in. The lower floor is the Dilek Sabancı Art Gallery, which holds exhibitions of photography, painting, marbling and contemporary art.
The building stands on the old Cumhuriyet Meydanı in the Savurkapı quarter and has a history of its own that is visible in the plan. It was put up toward the end of the nineteenth century, in the reign of Abdülhamid II, as a cavalry barracks for the Hamidiye regiments, commissioned by Hacı Hasan Paşa, governor of Diyarbakır; its inscription has not survived. Of its two storeys, the lower one, entered through the south door, was the stable, and the upper one held the administration and the dormitory. The single piece of decoration is at the entrance set at the middle of the north front: a depressed-arched doorway within a shallow rectangular niche, with carved relief ornament inside the thick border framing the door and above it.
The army kept it long after the cavalry left. From the early years of the Republic it served as the recruitment branch of the gendarmerie command and then as a gendarmerie station, and between 1991 and 2003 it was the tax office. The Sabancı Foundation then restored it as the Sakıp Sabancı Mardin City Museum and the Dilek Sabancı Art Gallery. Admission is charged.
Getting there
- Access
- On 1. Cadde, 200 metres east of the Şehidiye medrese, beside the old Government House, now the faculty of architecture.
When to go
- Climate
- Across Mardin as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 3.1 °C in January to 29.9 °C in July; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in May and October; rainfall is heaviest in January (114 mm) and lightest in August (2 mm). Long-term means for 1940-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
Visiting hours
- Hours
- 09:00 - 17:00, closed Monday
