Guide
The museum of Karadeniz Ereğli occupies Halil Paşa Konağı, a late nineteenth-century house in the middle of the town, at Orhanlar Mahallesi, Yalı Caddesi No 96, Meydanbasi. The three-storey mansion was built on the foundations of an older church for Halil Paşa, sanjak governor in the reign of Abdülhamid II, and was restored and opened as a museum in 1998.
The ground floor holds the archaeology: marble grave stelae, figured marble column capitals, glass vessels, jewellery, metalwork, lamps and figurines of the Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine periods, all collected from Ereğli and its surroundings. The first floor shows terracotta amphorae and coin collections that run from Lydian, Greek, Roman and Byzantine issues through Umayyad, Abbasid, Sasanian, Artuqid, Seljuk and Ottoman ones.
The second floor is ethnographic and local. Men's and women's costume is shown alongside elpek, a cloth woven only in this district, with its thread and the looms and tools used to make it, and then handkerchiefs, wrapping cloths and covers, weapons, seals, smoking equipment, prayer beads, clocks, kitchen ware, weights and measures, and manuscripts. The third floor is furnished as an Ottoman house — sitting room, guest room, everyday room and bedroom, in that order.
The garden is part of the display rather than an approach to it: column capitals, shafts and bases, architectural fragments and sarcophagi of the Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Seljuk and Ottoman periods stand there, together with the monumental tomb of the mime actor Krispos.
