Guide
The Şefik Bursalı Museum in Çankaya, Ankara, is the painter's own house, and the reason it works as a museum is that he arranged it himself. Born in Bursa in 1903, Şefik Bursalı began exhibiting in the shows of the Turkish Painters' Union while still a student of İbrahim Çallı, Hikmet Onat, Feyhaman Duran, Namık İsmail and Avni Lifij. He then went to Europe and worked in a number of art centres, taught at high schools in İzmir, Konya and İstanbul, and made his name between 1934 and 1936 with paintings of Seljuk subjects and of Mevlana that caught the character of the Konya steppe. Between 1937 and 1938, at Atatürk's wish, his work was shown in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Bucharest, Belgrade, Athens and Paris, and he exhibited in other European cities to good notices. He died on 20 April 1990.
Bursalı gave almost all of his paintings, together with the house and studio, to the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, and he chose the donated works himself so that they would cover every period of his career. When the house was turned into a museum it was fitted with the technical equipment needed to display the paintings and refurnished, while the garden was kept in its original natural state, and a bust of the artist was placed in front of the house. The point of the arrangement is that his work can be seen whole, and seen in the setting he lived in. The museum is on Ahmet Mithat Efendi Sokak, reachable by public transport towards Çankaya.
