Guide
The TOFAŞ Bursa Anatolian Carriages Museum is, in the Ministry's words, the first and only museum of Anatolian carriages in Türkiye. It occupies a silk factory belonging to the İpeker family in the Umurbey quarter, set on a site of 17,000 square metres, which TOFAŞ restored and opened as a museum on 28 June 2002.
The carriages here are presented as landmarks of a wheeled-vehicle industry and culture thousands of years old in Anatolia, and as products of Anatolian design history. The visit runs as a time tunnel from a wheel of 2,600 years ago to the motor vehicles TOFAŞ itself produced. What meets visitors first are backlit panels showing the Üçpınar tumulus — the original is in Balıkesir — and its excavation; the carriage and wheel fragments from inside that tumulus are the museum's starting point.
The museum also contains a workshop for making horse carriages and phaetons, assembled entirely from original equipment, which the museum describes as the thanks of new masters to old ones.
The garden is part of the visit. A plane tree three hundred years old and a black mulberry two hundred years old stand there among dozens of trees, plants, flowers and lawns, along with the 19th- and 20th-century cocoon buildings and an old Turkish house. The address is Umurbey Mahallesi, Kapıcı Caddesi, Yıldırım, and it can be walked to from the centre of Bursa.
