Guide
The Somuncu Baba and Hulusi Efendi Museum stands on Hulusi Efendi Avenue in the Zaviye quarter of the Darende district of Malatya. It is a private museum, opened on 25 June 2005 by the Es-Seyyid Osman Hulusi Efendi Foundation, and in 2013 the Ministry of Culture and Tourism recorded it as the fourth most visited private museum in the country.
The collection was built up by gifts from Darende itself and from places across Türkiye and abroad: 400 coins, 26 archaeological objects and 506 ethnographic pieces, most of the last dating from the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Among the things visitors take most interest in are Bronze Age pottery, plant and animal fossils, a piece of amethyst, spoons of bone and horn brought from Ethiopia, water flasks and wooden musical instruments, a python skin, shells used in the fighting at Çanakkale, and copies of the sword of Mehmed the Conqueror and of the Topkapı dagger.
Sheikh Hamid-i Veli, known as Somuncu Baba, was born in 1331 in the village of Akçakaya near Kayseri and lived in the Ottoman state in the reign of Bayezid I. He is believed to have descended from the Prophet Muhammad, and he is remembered as the mystic who carried the Safavid-Ardabil tradition into Anatolia, and as a poet of the divan tradition. He died at Darende in 1412.
During the restoration work carried out between 1990 and 2000 the tomb and the graveyard were restored in keeping with their original form. When the museum building itself was put up is not known.
