Guide
Isparta's ethnography museum is a tower rather than a hall: ten floors and roughly 3,000 square metres, built by the municipality from 2012 and opened in 2013. The municipality describes it as the only carpet and kilim museum in Turkey with both horizontal and vertical display galleries — that is, one built so that large pieces can be hung full height. A viewing tower at the top looks over the whole town, with a telescope for the far side of it, and there is a rose sculpture and open parking on the grounds.
Some 3,100 carpets and kilims are on show. The carpets include Isparta work alongside pieces from Ladik near Konya, Gördes, Şirvan, Milas, Kars and Erzurum; the flatweaves range from large kilims to small ones, prayer rugs, saddlebags, sacks, bags and woven belts from central and eastern Anatolia, the Aegean and the Mediterranean. Roughly 2,300 further objects fill out the ethnographic side: traditional dress from across the Turkic world, old household and farming implements, a Yörük tent, divan seating, early firearms, weaving looms, the stills used in making rose oil, and earthenware storage jars.
