Guide
Keşan's city museum is in a building the town still calls the Old Hospital, and that name is the point. Put up before the First World War, it served as a rear-line hospital during the Çanakkale campaign in 1914, then continued as the Red Crescent hospital, the provincial hospital and finally the state hospital until the early 1990s. For one generation of townspeople it is where their children were born, for another where they lost their elders; it is the best preserved old building in the centre of Keşan and has stood for more than a century.
The museum project began on 1 February 2020, run by the municipality with support from the ministry of culture and tourism, and the restored building opened on 18 March 2024 — the anniversary of the naval victory at Çanakkale, chosen because of what the building had been in 1914. The restoration won the prize for applied restoration in the national competition for protecting historic and cultural heritage. It is a registered building, symmetrical and E-shaped, on two floors, and is run by the municipality with private-museum status.
The right-hand corridor off the entrance runs chronologically from prehistory to the proclamation of the republic, with silicone figures of Gazi Süleyman Paşa and Hersekzade Ahmet Paşa, a trench set with a figure of Mustafa Kemal explaining what Keşan meant during the Çanakkale battles, and a music room with a figure of the clarinettist Selim Sesler; migration, the press and the history of medicine are treated alongside. Across the corridor come flora and fauna, climate, the Gulf of Saros, farming shown in dioramas, and sections on schooling, custom, cooking, architecture, administration and sport — much of it built from objects collected from the townspeople themselves and backed with LED and touch screens.
Downstairs a craftsmen's bazaar has been laid out for trades that are disappearing — the blacksmith, the tinner, the shoemaker — with life-cast silicone figures of local tradespeople, and the printing machinery of Önder, a newspaper published in the town for fifty-seven years without a break, next to its digitised archive on a touch screen. A workshop and a temporary exhibition space are on the same floor, and an open-air theatre in the garden takes school and civic events.
Getting there
The museum is at Necati İşcan Caddesi No. 2 in the Yukarı Zaferiye neighbourhood of Keşan. It is closed on Mondays; entry is free, and the national museum card does not apply.
