Guide
Silifke Museum in the Silifke district of Mersin holds 20,677 objects, the oldest of them dated to 2700 BC. Its twin museum is the Haßloch Museum in Germany.
Museum work in Silifke goes back to 1939, when objects found in the town and the region around it were first gathered in the Cumhuriyet Primary School. Part of the same school began to be used as a store and museum in 1958. Construction of a museum for displaying the objects began in 1973, and it opened on 2 August that year.
The collection covers the Early, Middle and Late Bronze Ages, the Iron Age, and the Archaic, Classical, Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman periods.
The stone gallery shows reliquaries, statues, sarcophagi and amphorae of the Archaic, Roman and Byzantine periods. The gallery of coins and jewellery holds coins of Macedonian, Roman, Byzantine, Egyptian, Pergamene and Ottoman rulers — among them Alexander the Great and Justinian I — with jewellery of various kinds. The archaeological gallery, covering the Bronze and Iron Ages and the Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine periods, shows Hittite hieroglyphic stamp and cylinder seals found in the excavations at Kilise Tepe, Mycenaean and Cypriot vessels, and candlesticks, vessels, pots, reliquaries and figurines from the excavations at Kelenderis. The last gallery is given to ethnography, with folk clothing and material of the Ottoman period.
