Guide
The Ziraat Bank Museum has served since 1981 in the hall of honour of the bank's head office in the Ulus quarter of the Altındağ district of Ankara, showing objects that trace the development of banking in Türkiye. It is, according to Turkish Wikipedia, the first banking museum in the country.
The building it occupies was designed in 1929 by the Italian architect Giulio Mongeri and is one of the works of the First National Architectural period.
The museum was founded to carry the bank's accumulated knowledge and experience forward. A great many objects once used in banking are presented here in a historic setting, along with some works by painters of the republican period from the bank's collection.
It opened on 20 November 1981, the 118th anniversary of the bank's founding, the opening performed by Sadi Irmak, then president of the consultative assembly. After restoration work begun in 2017, the strongrooms in the basement were taken into the museum as well, and the enlarged museum opened again in its renewed form in November 2019.
The collection holds calculating and writing machines used at the head office and the branches, crystal inkstand sets, old telephones, door plates in the old script, an interest calculating machine, a cheque writing machine and letter scales.
Among the most valuable pieces are the letters Mithat Pasha wrote and sealed to the grand vizier's office for the founding of the country funds that were the origin of the bank, the regulation covering the passage from those funds to Ziraat Bank, and account page number one, which belonged to Mithat Pasha himself.
The oldest painting in the collection is an oil called Pasture, signed by Henry Hadfield Cubley and dated 1897. Among the notable canvases are Namık İsmail's large oil Gazi Mustafa Kemal Among the Farmers, painted for the side entrance of the building, and İbrahim Çallı's Harvest, made specially for the right-hand wall of the inner hall.
