Guide
The Press Museum of the Turkish Journalists' Association occupies a historic building at Çemberlitaş in İstanbul and belongs to that association. The source calls it the first press museum in Türkiye and the fourth in the world. It opened in 1988.
To show how the technology of the press changed, the museum displays lithographs, a flatbed press, a rotary letterpress, an intertype machine, proofing benches, a guillotine, old typewriters, telex machines and wirephoto equipment.
The section on the history of the press holds a full-size model of the first printing house in the Ottoman empire, set up by İbrahim Müteferrika, along with some of the work printed there, a copy of the newspaper Vekayi-i Mısriye of 1828, and documents and newspapers telling how Turkish journalism developed.
The section on typesetting and printing machines shows a nineteenth-century binding press and an embossing machine, both still in working order, early examples of radiophoto and wirephoto equipment, telex machines, a typesetting machine of the kind that came into use in the 1970s, the tools used for letterpress printing, and the equipment used in making blocks.
A further section holds keepsakes of journalists who left their mark on the Turkish press. The museum also has halls for current exhibitions, a library and documentation centre, and a hall for handicrafts.
The building is a four-storey neoclassical structure put up in 1865 by Safvet Pasha, the minister of education, and used by the ministry of public education and by the Darülfünun, the university. The second exhibition of Turkish painting opened here on 1 July 1875, while the building served as the Darülfünun; the first had been held on 27 April 1873 at the industrial school in Sultanahmet. Arranged under the lead of Şeker Ahmet Pasha, that mixed exhibition held his own work along with that of other Turkish painters and of foreign artists.
In the reign of Abdülhamid II the building was given over to the censorship board. In those years the proofs of everything that was to go into the newspapers were submitted to the board in the evening by the editors, and passages, paragraphs and whole sections were struck out by the censors before the proofs were sent back.
The building passed to the İstanbul municipality in 1908, and various municipal departments worked here until 1983. Leased to the Turkish Journalists' Association, it was restored between 1984 and 1988 and opened as the Press Museum on 9 May 1988.
