Guide
The word to notice in the name is 'applied'. This is not only a display of kilims: looms stand in the museum and women weave on them, and the younger generation is taught to weave there. The municipality describes it as the first applied kilim museum in Türkiye.
The collection came out of fieldwork rather than purchase. For more than a year the district and other parts of Eskişehir were surveyed, and what that survey turned up became the inventory, including kilims a century old.
The building is the old municipal offices, rebuilt for the purpose: work began in June 2018, finished in September 2019, and the museum opened in 2020. It runs to about 600 square metres over two floors, with a weaving and sales area, two exhibition halls and 42 display areas. The kilims are kept in sealed glazed cases and the whole building is climate-controlled.
The architecture repeats the subject. Timber is worked into both the inside and the outside, and the motifs cut into the exterior woodwork are taken from Sivrihisar kilims themselves.
