Guide
The Alaçam Exchange Museum stands in the Alaçam district of Samsun and is, according to Turkish Wikipedia, the first museum in Türkiye on the subject of the population exchange. It holds ethnographic material — daily objects, documents and photographs — of the people who settled in Samsun through the exchange of populations between Türkiye and Greece. More than ten thousand people visit each year.
The building was put up in the last quarter of the nineteenth century to serve as a primary school and was taken over and used by various institutions in later years. It was restored by the Samsun provincial special administration in 2010. The source records that it was opened as a museum by the Samsun metropolitan municipality on 16 April 2016, with the help of the Alaçam Exchange and Balkan Turkish Culture Research Association, and that the formal opening was made on 18 September 2012 by the minister of culture and tourism, Ertuğrul Günay; the two dates do not agree, and the source does not resolve them.
When to go
The museum is open every day between 8.00 and 17.30.
