Guide
The Adnan Menderes Democracy Museum is in Koçarlı in Aydın and covers the life and the period of Adnan Menderes, the ninth prime minister of Türkiye. It was opened by the president on 15 January 2022.
The building is a reconstruction of the wooden mansion built for Hacı Ali Paşa by Hungarian architects, which belonged to the Menderes family and burned to the ground in a fire in the 1950s.
The museum stands near the village where the former prime minister was born and grew up and near the family's vineyard house. It occupies ninety dönüm of land and has three floors of 840 square metres each. A bridge Menderes had built over the Çine stream stands just beside it.
The displays set out his memories and his life within the period he lived in, arranged in order of date, so that the museum is at once a museum of one man and of an age.
On the second floor visitors are met with the founding of the Democrat Party, the events of those years, its language and its values, the people involved, the works carried out, the investments made and the institutions founded.
Among the objects here is one of the first Turkish-built tractors, made on 6 April 1955 by Türk Traktör at the Gazi farm in Ankara. Alongside material from Menderes's personal life, the museum shows works covering his political life.