Guide
Before planning a visit, note this: the museum building was closed to visitors on 16 July 2025 on the grounds that it could not withstand an earthquake, the collection was moved into containers in the museum garden, and the building was demolished in September 2025. The General Directorate of Cultural Heritage and Museums has said it aims to finish a new building on the same site by the end of 2026. The decision, taken on 20 March 2025 and based on a seismic performance report from 2020, drew objections: professional chambers and thirteen civil society organisations called for the demolition to be stopped and the building preserved, and the fact that the reports behind the decision were not made public drew criticism and protests.
The museum holds close to a hundred thousand objects, most of them from the three Mediterranean civilisations that lived within the bounds of Antalya — Lycia, Pamphylia and Pisidia — and it counts among the largest archaeological museums in Türkiye. Most of the marble works came from the ruins of Perge. Its emblem is the Dancing Woman, a statue two metres twenty-five high found at Perge in 1981, carved with white marble for the bare parts of the body and dark marble for the clothing and hair, with no known parallel anywhere.
The museum began in an occupation. After the First World War Antalya and its surroundings were occupied by Italian forces, and archaeologists who arrived with them in 1919 began carrying the inscriptions and statues they found to the Italian consulate. Süleyman Fikri Bey, a teacher at the Antalya lycée, applied to the provincial authority to be appointed Director of Antiquities in order to stop them, and once made honorary director he cleared the abandoned Bayraktar Baba mosque in Kaleiçi and gathered the antiquities there. When the Italians left in 1921 he moved the pieces they had collected at the consulate into the same room. The collection went next to the Panayia church, emptied after the war, where the museum properly took shape in 1922; he became its official keeper in 1923, its director in 1924, and held the post until he retired in 1941.
From 1937 the museum occupied the Yivli Minare mosque, where it stayed thirty-five years. Excavations at Perge, fifteen kilometres east of Antalya, began in 1946, and when the statues and sarcophagi they produced had filled the garden a new building became necessary. A national architectural competition was opened in 1964 and won by Doğan Tekeli, Sami Sisa and Metin Hepgüler; the museum moved into the resulting building in the Konyaaltı district in 1972 and opened there on 25 November. It was awarded the Council of Europe's special prize in 1988 and certificates of excellence in 2012, 2014 and 2015.
Two of its holdings came back from abroad after long disputes. The Elmalı coins, taken in illegal excavations at Elmalı in 1984 and smuggled out of the country, were returned to Türkiye in 1999 after a fifteen-year legal fight, kept for a decade at the Museum of Anatolian Civilisations in Ankara, and brought to Antalya at the museum's request in 2009. The lower half of a second-century statue of Herakles, the Weary Hercules, was found at Perge in 1980; the upper half was identified at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 1990, recovered in 2011, and the two halves were joined and put on display on 9 October that year.
Visit status for this record: open to visitors.
