Guide
The museum is in the Cıbıroğlu Konağı on Ressam Osman Zeki Oral Sokak in the Akarca quarter, one of the buildings that make up the old centre of the town. The municipality's account describes it as a nineteenth-century house built by Greek masters on a cross plan, three storeys in masonry. You enter at ground level into the long hall the district calls a taşlık, its floor laid with even red stone, with the old kitchen and store rooms off it and a wooden stair to the floor above. The two upper floors are boarded and have four rooms each, generally with a hearth in the rooms facing west and niches in those facing east; the top ceiling is carved.
The rooms have been named rather than numbered, after figures and families of Ereğli: three principal halls carry the names Herakles, Herakleides and Uzun Mehmet, there is a small cinema room, and the Klearkhos room houses the local research centre and the Memnon library. The information desk is built as the ship Argo.
The display works through reconstructed scenes as much as objects. A corner is given to Uzun Mehmet the miner, and others to women kneading dough and rolling out yufka, to a henna night, and to a loom with a woman weaving elpek cloth. Around them are the tools and everyday things of the region, with illustrated panels on the natural, historical and cultural life of Ereğli.
Getting to this point took several years. The house was expropriated by the municipality in 2011 for use as a city museum, and the project was put in the same year to the Directorate General of Cultural Heritage and Museums, the Karadeniz Ereğli Museum, the Union of Historical Towns and the ÇEKÜL Foundation, and in 2013 to the West Black Sea Development Agency. It opened to the public on 2 December 2014, and in November 2019 the Union of Historical Towns gave it an application award in its competition for heritage conservation projects.
