Guide
The Sabiha Tansuğ Ethnography Museum is in the Bademler arts village in Urla, and it exists because of one woman's fifty years of collecting.
Sabiha Tansuğ — ethnologist, researcher, writer and collector — was born into a Muslim Turkish family from Rumelia, in Komotini in Greece. The family migrated to the Aegean in August 1941, and she went through primary school in a series of small towns; the wedding trousseaux and dress she saw in the villages became her first comparative material. She went on to the Göztepe girls' vocational institute in İzmir, and in 1951 moved to İstanbul, where she made her living sewing for the city's better-off families.
Travelling abroad, she worked systematically on traditional dress, going through the museums and open-air village museums of Paris, Vienna, London, Romania, Hungary, Denmark, Japan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Moscow. She was also a journalist and writer, and she put what she had learned into the Pierre Loti coffee house, restoring it in keeping with Ottoman coffee culture and obtaining — the source states — the first tourism certificate ever given to a coffee house in Türkiye, which is where her standing as an ethnographer came from.
Her collection, assembled over roughly half a century, is described as carrying traces of thousands of years of culture in each piece. One episode stands out: after her exhibition 'Forty Anatolian Women's Headdresses', her photograph wearing an Ankara bridal headdress was printed on the 50-kurus coin in circulation between 1971 and 1979, which the source describes as making her the only private citizen in the world whose picture has appeared on money.
The museum opens 09:00 to 19:00 and is closed on Mondays.
