Guide
Bayazhan was built in 1909 by a tobacco merchant, Bayaz Ahmet Efendi, and Gaziantep Metropolitan Municipality turned it into the city's museum of itself, opening it in 2009. It is the place to start if you have just arrived: the displays cover Gaziantep's history, its sights, its landscape, its economy, its crafts and its food, arranged so that a visitor can get the shape of the city before going out into it.
The craft sections are staged rather than shelved — mannequins shown at work in kutnu weaving, mother-of-pearl inlay and coppersmithing, the trades the city is known for. There is also a hall devoted to Gaziantep's sister cities, temporary exhibition spaces, and scale models of the city's significant buildings.
