Guide
The Gökyay Foundation Chess Museum occupies about a thousand square metres in the museum quarter of Hamamönü in Ankara, in a building put up in the traditional Ankara house manner. It shows the chess sets that the collector Akın Gökyay gathered from different parts of the world.
Gökyay, a collector and businessman, began building the collection in 1975; it was, according to Turkish Wikipedia, the first registered chess collection in Türkiye. On 31 January 2012 it entered the Guinness Book of Records with 412 sets and has gone on growing: as of 2024 it holds 723 sets from 111 countries.
The sets are made of a wide range of materials — wood, metal, fish bone, marble, soapstone, felt and polyester among them — and they carry the cultural marks of the countries where they were made. There are themed sets drawn from Harry Potter, Asterix and the Smurfs, and sets reflecting historical and political events.
The museum came about on the suggestion of Veysel Tiryaki, then mayor of Altındağ. Gökyay bought two plots in a protected area where the buildings had fallen into ruin and put up copies of those ruined buildings on them. Following the plan of the old Ankara house, the two basements and the lower floors were built in Ankara stone and the rest in timber and brick.
After the building was finished, Gökyay founded the Gökyay Chess, Sport and Culture Foundation in 2013 and gave his whole collection to it. The foundation established the museum, which opened in 2015 as a private museum attached to the Ankara Ethnography Museum.
In 2018 the museum was given an award by the Anatolia Ankara tourism operators' association for what it adds to tourism in the city, and in 2022 it received the Special Award of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism.
