Guide
The Baksı Museum is an art museum in the village of Bayraktar, forty-five kilometres from Bayburt. Baksı, the old name of the village, meant among the early Turks a scholar, a physician, a shaman. The museum holds both contemporary art and traditional handicrafts.
It stands on forty decares of ground and has exhibition halls, a store museum, workshops, a conference hall, a library and a guest house. It was built by the artist and academic Hüsamettin Koçan, himself from Bayburt. The idea took shape from 2000 and grew with the founding of the Baksı Culture and Art Foundation in 2005; the main building was completed in 2010 without any financial help from the state, introduced at İstanbul Modern that June and opened to the public in July. The new exhibition hall, the Store Museum, opened in 2012.
The museum received the Council of Europe Museum Prize for 2014, awarded under the auspices of the Parliamentary Assembly, at the Palais Rohan in Strasbourg on Tuesday 8 April. The emblem of the prize, Joan Miró's bronze figure The Woman with the Beautiful Breast, was displayed at the museum for a year.
