Guide
Adana's archaeological museum is one of the ten oldest museums in Türkiye. It was founded in 1924, a few months after the republic was declared, and it began in the least museum-like way possible: column capitals and sarcophagi found around the city were gathered at the police headquarters. Under its director Halil Kamil Bey it opened properly in 1928, in the medrese of the Cafer Paşa Mosque at the head of the Taşköprü bridge — a building that no longer stands.
It has moved three times since. In 1950 it went to the Kuruköprü Monument Museum, which also served for a while as the ethnography museum; on 5 January 1972 it opened in a purpose-built home; and when that building in turn proved unable to conserve, store and display the collection, the ministry chose an unexpected replacement — the Milli Mensucat textile mill in Döşeme, Seyhan, one of the first industrial plants Adana ever had. Work started in 2013, and the archaeology museum opened in the restored mill on 18 May 2017.
The display runs through eight halls, from prehistory to the present, using information panels, images, dioramas and reconstructions rather than cases alone. Stone works — statues, sarcophagi, stelae, altars and busts — come from the Hittite, Assyrian, Archaic, Hellenistic, Roman, East Roman, Seljuk and Ottoman periods, alongside glass, terracotta and bronze vessels, lamps, figurines, cylinder and stamp seals and jewellery. The pieces the museum singles out are the stone statue of the Hittite storm god Tarhunda, a stele with an Anatolian hieroglyphic inscription, a Babylonian stele, a bronze male figure recovered from the sea off Karataş, and two Roman sarcophagi — an anthropoid one and the Achilles sarcophagus.
The building deserves a paragraph of its own. The mill was founded in 1906 by Aristidi Kozma Simyonoglu and started work in 1907 as the Simyanoglu Factory; it changed hands in 1924 and became the Milli Fabrika. In 1927, on Atatürk's instructions, Mustafa Özgür, Nuri Has and Seyit Tekin bought it and reorganised it as Milli Mensucat, and its 'Aslan' brand yarn made it known across the country. Hacı Ömer Sabancı became a partner in 1944; economic trouble sent it back to the treasury in 1978, and it started up again in 1983 as Milsan Mensucat.
Visit status for this record: open to visitors.
