Guide
The İlhan Koman Museum of Sculpture and Painting has worked in Edirne since 2002 and belongs to the Faculty of Fine Arts of Trakya University. It stands in a historic mansion in the garden of the old Karaağaç railway station, which houses the faculty. As of 2019 its collection held works by 376 artists.
The museum opened on 23 September 2002, the twentieth anniversary of the founding of Trakya University, in the medical medrese of the Bayezid II complex, under the name Museum of Contemporary Painting and Sculpture. The collection was formed under the guidance of Ayla Ersoy, Ali Candaş and Basri Erdem, then teaching at Marmara University, and every work in it was given by the artist who made it. The museum gained its official standing through a letter from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism dated 23 October 2002.
In 2008, when the medical medrese was turned into the section of the Health Museum in the complex that presents medical teaching, the works of the museum were gathered up and kept in a room of that museum. The museum moved on 20 July 2011 to the historic Karaağaç station building, then in use as the rectorate of Trakya University. By a decision of the university senate on 21 November 2011 its name was changed to the İlhan Koman Museum of Sculpture and Painting, after the sculptor from Edirne whose works are among those held here.
The first works put on display formed a collection of 101 pieces including stained glass, ceramics, sculpture, prints and oil paintings, made by eighty-seven different artists, nine of them from abroad, and gathered entirely by donation. The valuation commission formed during the founding of the museum recorded in a minute published on 16 December 2002 that the collection was worth 260,250,000,000 in the Turkish lira of that time.
Among the works given by the family of İlhan Koman were pieces from his student years: two reliefs of female figures, two female torsos, a female bust and plaster nude studies.
