Guide
Before planning a visit: the ministry states that the Ürgüp Museum has been closed since 11 December 2023 for structural strengthening, with no completion date given.
The building was begun in 1969 and opened in July 1971. Stone and terracotta works are set into the arcades on its south, east and west fronts and along the entrance stairs.
The first things in the entrance are fossils rather than antiquities: mammoth teeth from within the boundaries of Mustafapasa, which the museum dates to before the Neogene-Miocene — roughly ten million years, before humans — and, in the first part of the display hall, marine fossils known to have come from around Acıgöl. The museum's point in showing them is that they are evidence that central Anatolia was once an inland sea, the body of water called the Neotethys.
The archaeological section holds handmade terracotta pottery, metalwork and glass of the Early Bronze Age and the Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine periods, with three cases of gold, silver and bronze coins and medals running from Greek and Roman through Seljuk, the Anatolian principalities, Byzantine and Ottoman. The ethnographic section covers life in Ürgüp and its surroundings through weaving, metalwork, stone and glass.
