Guide
Misi — officially Gumustepe, in the Nilüfer district of Bursa — has been turning itself into an arts village, and this museum, opened in November 2023, is the latest piece of it. Nilüfer municipality restored a three-storey historic house and assigned it for ten years to the Bursa UNESCO Association, which runs it. The municipality describes it as the second and, after the one at Altındağ in Ankara, the most comprehensive museum of intangible cultural heritage in Türkiye, and the first of its kind in Bursa.
Intangible heritage means the things that are practised rather than displayed, and the museum covers all five of its recognised domains. The association's stated aim is to keep them alive rather than record them: live performance, craft workshops, teaching programmes and demonstrations are part of what the building is for.
Inside, rooms are arranged around occasions and practices — a performance space, handicraft workshops, and rooms for conversation, for a wedding, for a circumcision feast, for storytelling and for games. The garden carries the rest: sections on the folk calendar, folk cookery and folk medicine, where traditional celebrations and children's games are played out with visitors taking part. School groups are expected as a matter of course.
It is not the only museum in the village. Nilüfer had already opened a photography museum and a literature museum in Misi, alongside a writers' house, an arts house, a silk house and a children's library, so the three can be seen in one walk.
