Guide
Alaeddin Yavaşça was born in Kilis on 1 March 1926 and died in İstanbul on 23 December 2021. He wrote more than 600 works for Turkish classical music and trained a great many singers; he was made a State Artist in 1991, received the Presidential Grand Prize for Culture and Art in 2008, and the parliament's Distinguished Service Award in 2010. The ministry calls him the great plane tree of Turkish music.
The museum is the house he was born and grew up in, and the house is worth the visit on its own account. Its inscription dates it to 1910-11. His father, Hacı Cemil Yavaşça, had the floors brought from Italy, and made two things himself: the carvings on the windows and cupboard doors, and a sundial in the courtyard that tells the exact hour from the shadow of a nail.
It is a two-storey konak of about 300 square metres, near-square in plan, with wooden ceilings and Italian marble floors, built of the off-white cut stone particular to Kilis. The courtyard is open, with a well and an ornamental pool at its centre and eight rooms around it whose windows look onto it. Beside the kitchen on the ground floor is what is known to have been a bath, reached by its own stair and heated from below, and the cellar, stone-built under a cross vault, is where the winter food was kept.
The house was registered as cultural property in 2003, allocated to the ministry in January 2016, and opened as the Alaeddin Yavaşça Museum on 1 March 2022 — his birthday. The basement covers life in old Kilis: the history of its houses, samples of the materials they were built from, the city's registered monuments, and a short film. The ground floor takes his composing, his years in radio, his family life and childhood, his arrival in İstanbul and his medical training; the first floor holds the music room and covers his concerts, his writing, his poetry and his painting. Throughout there are information panels, the things he used at work and at home, his books, his awards, photographs, and silicone figures of him.
