Guide
The Trabzon Press History Museum occupies a historic building in Ortahisar in Trabzon and was created by the Trabzon Journalists' Association together with the Ortahisar municipality. It comes under the municipality's culture and social affairs directorate, and the source describes it as the fourth press museum in Türkiye and, as of 2023, the one holding the most material.
The museum opened on 10 January 2023. It sets out the history of the press in Trabzon in order of date from 1865 to the present, and shows how the technology changed: lithographs, a flatbed press, proofing benches, old typewriters, telex machines and wirephoto equipment, darkroom equipment, and 150 years of the camera.
The printing house section holds a great many presses and devices used in Trabzon from 1865 onwards. One of three presses of the Frankenthal make — the other two now in Germany and Russia — is displayed here. Ottoman-period newspapers and documents printed in Trabzon in 1890, among them Meşveret and İstikbal, are held here as well.
The machines used for over a hundred years by Sonhaber, the oldest printing house in the region, are shown here, along with issues eighty years old of the newspapers printed there — Hizmet, Çaykara and Yeniyol.
In the section on typesetting and printing machines are a nineteenth-century binding press and an embossing machine, both still in working order, together with early wirephoto equipment, telex machines, a typesetting machine of the kind that came into use in the 1970s, the tools used for letterpress printing, the equipment used in making blocks, and the compositors' cases.
A further section holds keepsakes of journalists who left their mark on the press in Trabzon, and there is a press library for the use of students of communication.
