Guide
The Arslan Eyce Taşucu Private Amphora Museum is at Cumhuriyet Alanı, Vakıf Han No 9, in Taşucu in the Silifke district of Mersin. It opened in 1997 in a historic building, around a collection of amphorae given by Arslan Eyce, and the provincial directorate describes it as the first and only amphora museum in Türkiye.
The objects did not come out of the ground. They are trading amphorae that fishermen brought up in their nets off Taşucu, Mersin and Antalya, which is a different kind of collection from an excavated one: what survived is what was carried by sea and lost at sea.
The span runs from the seventh century BC to the eighteenth century AD, vessels used in the oil trade. The earliest are Syro-Palestinian and Cypriot groups of the seventh century BC, with early trading amphorae from the Aegean islands — Thasos, Mende, Lesbos, Samos and Chios. The Hellenistic period, from 330 to 30 BC, is represented by the great wine exporters of the day: Knidos on the Datça peninsula, Rhodes and Kos, along with Corinthian jars from mainland Greece.
Most of what is shown is Roman, from 30 BC to AD 395, and the list of origins is the point of the room: Samos, Ephesos and Kos in the Aegean; Cilicia and Pamphylia in Anatolia; Sinop on the Black Sea; Egypt and Tunisia in North Africa; Syria, Beirut and Palestine in the Levant; and Portugal, Spain and southern Italy in Europe. The Byzantine period is represented by jars made at Ganos near Tekirdağ and at Tarsus. Taken together, the museum argues, they show how closely this coast traded with the major centres of the ancient world.
