Guide
The İstanbul Toy Museum opened on 23 April 2005 in a historic house in the Göztepe quarter that had come down to the poet Sunay Akın from his family. Its collection is made up of antique toys standing for different cultures, which he bought from collectors in more than forty countries over twenty years with the intention of founding a museum.
Akın began researching the history of toys after visiting the toy museum in Nuremberg. The İstanbul museum is the second toy museum in Türkiye, after the one opened within Ankara University in 1990. Its running was taken on by Akın's wife, the philosophy teacher Belgin Akın, and the design was the work of the stage designer Ayhan Doğan.
In 2012 the European Museum Academy chose it as one of the thirteen best toy museums in Europe. In November of the same year it hosted the first meeting of TOYCO, the union of toy and children's museums, founded by Akın to bring together museums of the kind from around the world.
The museum served as the model for new toy museums opened in Antalya, in Ataşehir and in Gaziantep, with Akın as adviser and curator, and in 2023 it mounted a year-long exhibition of Turkish toys at the Nuremberg toy museum that had inspired its founding.
Its story is the subject of a book published in 2014, which also tells the life and the toy memories of Gürol Kutlu, a retired pilot who has worked as a volunteer at the museum since 2005.
Three life-size concrete giraffes, in gold, silver and bronze, stand in the garden and serve as street lamps at night. They keep alive the memory of a giraffe statue that once stood at the mansion of Münif Tahir Pasha on the same street, today the Kazım Karabekir mansion. Figures of Keloğlan and Nasreddin Hoca stand in the garden as well.
