Guide
The Silk Road Museum in Trabzon is the museum of the city's chamber of commerce and industry, built up under a project the chamber called the Trabzon City Museum Project and carried out with the support of the Eastern Black Sea Development Agency. Its own account of the collection is a short one, and it is best read as a list of what is in the cases.
The object that belongs to nobody but Trabzon is the silver seal of the Trabzon Provincial Assembly. Beside it sit the things an Ottoman official desk would have carried: an inkwell of Yıldız porcelain bearing a tuğra, and a signed silver divit, the portable pen-and-ink case, dated to the eighteenth century.
The books are the other strength. There are eighteenth-century Qur'ans in their original bindings, one with gilded illumination and one decorated in gold, and an illuminated prayer book of the same century, bound and with miniatures, associated with Hüseyin Şükrü of Akçaabat. Metalwork rounds out the display — a nineteenth-century silver medal of the Greek war, a brass oil cruet of the same century, and a lidded copper dish from Azerbaijan. The chamber has also published a book on historic objects from Trabzon of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, and the museum keeps a separate section for folk instruments that have come close to being forgotten.
