Guide
The Anatolian Toy Museum opened in 2017 in what had been the crèche of the Antalya yarn weaving factory, founded by the Kepez municipality. It was the first part of the Dokumapark Museums Island. Hakan Tütüncü, then mayor, founded it, and its curator is the museum specialist and archaeologist Nevzat Çevik.
Thirteen thousand eight hundred toys are shown in fifteen rooms on fifteen separate themes, brought from sixteen European countries and from many provinces of Anatolia. The museum holds examples of toys from around the world, but its real subject is the historical and local toys of Anatolia. Among the pieces that stand out are a wooden rocking horse of 1850 covered in straw, and a doll carrying the cut hair of a Jewish girl brought as a prisoner to Auschwitz during the Second World War.
The museum stands on about 4,000 square metres with 750 square metres of enclosed display space, divided into fifteen independent sections, each with its own theme and design. A tree in human form greets children at the entrance. Downstairs are a library and an art workshop for all ages, and there is a cafeteria entered through a wall made of 24,000 marbles, with a small cinema and theatre inside it.
The grounds run to five decares in all. A specially designed park lies at the exit, and in the garden stand two monumental olive trees, one a thousand years old and the other eleven hundred, along with an electric two-carriage train that takes children round.
