Guide
The Tanzimat edict of 1839 gave non-Muslims the right to govern their own affairs and to build schools and places of worship, and a striking number of churches went up in Anatolian towns in the years that followed. A Greek inscription of nine lines on a marble panel above the west door records that this building was put up by the Greek community in 1845.
In 1924 it was decided to found the Adana Antiquities Museum to show the archaeological wealth of the region, and Halil Kâmil Bey, known as Alyanak, was appointed to direct it. The Cafer Ağa medrese near the Stone Bridge was chosen first as the museum building; after a period in use it became unusable and was demolished, and the collection was moved to the Greek church.
In 1937 the museum director A. Rıza Yalgan added a new section to set out the ethnography of Çukurova, and the museum took the name Ethnography Museum alongside Adana Archaeological Museum. In doing so Yalgan founded the first open-air museum in the country.
The building served as the Adana Museum from 1950. When the Archaeological Museum opened in 1972 and many objects were moved there, it became a store; a restoration in 1983 returned it to use as the Ethnography Museum. The ministry began another restoration in 2008, at which point the ethnographic collection was moved to the existing Archaeological Museum; that work was completed in 2015 and the building opened as the Adana Kuruköprü Monument Museum.
