Guide
The Yörük Ali Efe Museum has been open since 2001 in the Yenipazar district of Aydın. It was founded to keep alive the memory of Yörük Ali Efe, a local hero, and his grave and a statue of him stand in the garden.
The house on Yörük Ali Efe Avenue in Yenipazar, thought to have been built at the end of the nineteenth century, belonged to him. It burnt down completely in a fire in the 1980s, and afterwards the building and its garden were left to their fate.
In 1995 the culture commission of the Aydın governorship, chaired by the provincial culture director Özgen Karaca, proposed that the house of the man who led the armed resistance against the occupying forces in Aydın during the war of independence be restored and brought back to life as a house museum for coming generations. The governorship put the proposal to the Ministry of Culture.
A promise was obtained from Kayhan Kavas, on behalf of the heirs, that the property would be given to the ministry if the project went ahead. A protocol between the ministry and the heirs on using the house as a museum was signed in 1997, and the property was formally assigned to the ministry in 1999. The directorate of surveys and monuments in İzmir prepared the measured drawings and the redesign and renewal projects, which were approved by the regional board for the protection of cultural and natural property. The ministry directed that the restoration be paid for out of the revenue from the archaeological sites of Aydın province, and the work was put out to tender by the provincial standing committee on 13 December 1999, to run across 1999 and 2000. A plot that had earlier been separated from the property was expropriated and taken back into the garden, and buildings and canopies added later were pulled down so that the garden returned to its original state.
Under this work the ruined building and the whole garden were cleared, and the house was then rebuilt from the foundations up according to a renewal project faithful to the original and to the principles of restoration. A second building was put up in the garden holding a ticket office, a guard's room and lavatories for visitors, and the shelter was repaired. The outbuilding known as the old almond house was repaired and turned into a country café for visitors. Stretches of garden wall that had fallen were repaired or rebuilt, and the laying out of the garden was completed.
Yörük Ali Efe had been buried in the Yenipazar cemetery; his grave is now in the garden of the museum.
