Guide
The heart of this museum is money. Its numismatic collection runs to more than 55,000 coins, medals and orders, and the museum considers it one of the significant private collections in the world for its chronological continuity. The body of it is the coinage of the Islamic states, but it reaches back at one end to ancient Greece and Rome and forward at the other to the early Republic, so that roughly 2,600 years of political and economic history can be followed with almost no break, from Athens and Bergama to Rome and İstanbul and from the Arabian peninsula to Spain. What is on show is a selection: 250 pieces in electrum, gold, silver and copper, chosen to tell the history of money itself.
The second half of the museum is ethnographic, more than a thousand pieces of Turkish-Islamic material dating from the sixteenth century onwards. Tombak and silver work, pocket watches and personal belongings of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk are kept and displayed in this section.
The collection was assembled by a bank. Kâzım Taşkent, who founded Yapı Kredi in 1944, set up a culture and art department within it and put Vedat Nedim Tör at its head, and from 1953 onwards the bank began buying, at auction at home and abroad and from private collections, with figures such as İbrahim Hakkı Konyalı and Şevket Rado taking part. In 1992 what had been acquired was constituted as the Yapı Kredi Museum, a private museum within the bank operating under the Ministry of Culture and Tourism.
