Guide
The Anadolu Open Air Museum, called Yaşayan Köy or the Living Village, is at Macun village, eight kilometres from Beypazarı in Ankara province. It opened in 2016, and the museum describes it as the first hands-on open-air museum to operate in Türkiye.
It is one of three related museums in Beypazarı founded by the culture scholar Dr Zehra Sema Demir, who has been running social initiatives here since 2007 with the aim of keeping Anatolian culture alive and passing it on. The first was the Yaşayan Müze, opened in 2007 as the country's first example of the hands-on museums common elsewhere in the world; the second was the Turkish Bath Museum of 2012, which the museum describes as the first of its kind in Türkiye and the third in the world. Dr Demir is also the founder and chair of the Anatolian Values Association.
Getting there: buses leave Ankara from beneath Akköprü every half hour in summer and hourly in winter, and from Beypazarı a taxi covers the last stretch. By car, the signs for Tekke Dağı, Yaşayan Köy and the other villages appear just before the Shell station in Beypazarı; turn right and follow that road eight kilometres without branching off.
