Guide
Key Museum opened in 2015 at Torbalı, southeast of İzmir, and it is a car museum on a scale that is unusual anywhere: 7,000 square metres, with a main collection of 89 cars and 46 motorcycles. The museum describes itself as the most comprehensive classic car and motorcycle museum in Türkiye.
The collection is arranged to be read as a history rather than a line-up. It runs from the first automobile built in 1886 to the present, following the earliest models of Mercedes, BMW, Porsche, Cadillac and Ford through to what those marques became. Around the cars are more than two thousand model cars at various scales, over 300 bonnet mascots, car-themed scarves, and a complete Shell petrol station rebuilt from original equipment collected from the early 1900s to the 1960s.
It began as two brothers' hobby. Murat Özgörkey started by collecting matchboxes as a child and moved on to model cars in the 1990s; Selim Özgörkey was a rally driver who competed on the circuits. They began acquiring the pieces now in the museum in 2001.
For anyone touring the region the location is convenient: the museum is on the same route as Ephesus, ten kilometres from the ancient city of Metropolis, 20 to 25 minutes from İzmir Adnan Menderes airport and about half an hour from central İzmir.
