Guide
The Yozgat Museum opened in 1985 in an old two-storey wooden mansion known as the Nizamoğlu house. Archaeological material is displayed on the lower floor and ethnographic material on the upper.
The museum was founded to show the ethnographic works of the Yozgat region; in 2008 the halls on the lower floor were laid out to display the archaeological material recovered in the region.
The house was built for a non-Muslim Ottoman subject and finished in 1871. It was bought by the Nizamoğlu family and served for many years as a dwelling. It was later used for a time as a girls' art school and for a period as a tobacco monopoly store. The Ministry of Culture took it under protection in 1979, and after restoration it opened as a museum in 1985.
The ceilings of two rooms on the second floor in particular are decorated entirely by hand, worked like carpets. These were the rooms in which guests were received. The wall paintings take up subjects such as the justice of Solomon, Christ seen within fire, the wars of Napoleon and the great fire of Yozgat.
The first part of the archaeological section shows the finds from the mounds of Çadır Höyük, Alişar Höyük, Cemallı Höyük and Mercimektepe and from the ancient city on Kerkenes mountain.
The ethnographic section holds regional dress, carpets, kitchen and household implements, weapons and wooden objects reflecting the late Ottoman period and the first years of the republic. In the upper rooms there are also nineteenth-century paintings, and among the objects displayed here are an organ made in the nineteenth century that came from the Yozgat lycée, along with the banners of the Çapanoğlu family and of the dervish lodge.
