Guide
The Bolvadin Museum, also called the Yanık Kışla municipal museum, is a mixed museum belonging to the municipality in the Bolvadin district of Afyonkarahisar, showing both archaeological and ethnographic material.
The first museum building had 687 square metres under cover and 232 square metres of open space. It was built as the municipal cinema, served for a time as the municipal culture centre, and was finally turned into a museum by a decision of the municipality in 1987; it is a building of two floors.
Some fifty archaeological objects that had until then been gathered in the garden of the Bolvadin lycée and at the alkaloid factory were brought to the building after the conversion, and these formed the core of the collection. Nurettin Özkan was appointed the museum's founder and first director.
On display are finds of the Early Bronze Age, of the Roman, Byzantine, Seljuk and Ottoman periods and of the republic, together with ethnographic material reflecting the customs of the region.
Among the things shown are photographs and material on the growing and use of the poppy at Bolvadin and on the making of reed matting around Lake Eber; the tools of trades such as shoemaking, harness making, carpentry, barbering, farming and smithing; equipment from a molasses works and from the making of clotted cream, with figures of the products; kitchen implements of various kinds, clothing, weights and scales, and firearms and other weapons.
The museum also holds coin and currency collections, chiefly Roman and Byzantine but taking in the Turkish emirates, the Ottomans and the republic, along with Roman and Byzantine sarcophagus fragments and stelae and Ottoman gravestones.
