It’s often the smaller museums in a place full of world famous sites which don’t get the attention from visitors they deserve. One of these places is the Rezan Has Museum in Cibali (near the Golden Horn.
Entrance to Rezan Has Museum
The museum is located within the compound and building of Istanbul’s Kadir Has University which, by itself, is remarkable for several reasons.
The university owes its existence to private initiative, i.e. the foundation created by wealthy Turkish business man Kadir Has and his wife Rezan. They felt the need to give back to the community and founded a university which now has 7 faculties and has become the most popular and fastest growing in Turkey, although it officially opened only in 2002.
Rezan was an avid collector of antiquities and artefacts and what better place to make her collection available to the public than creating a museum within the university complex.
The entire university is located in what was a tobacco factory, built in 1884 which had fallen into disarray and was salvaged and restored by the foundation.
The museum and university promote the arts, history and culture of Turkey. You enter at the ground floor and find changing exhibitions of modern Turkish photographers who have taken up a theme. When I visited two weeks ago, it was an exhibition of stunning photographs of the mountain city of Hasankeyf on the shores of the Tigris in what was Mesopotamia, a dwelling which is currently threatened to be submerged by a planned huge water reservoir. The exhibitions change.
Photo of Hasankeyf/Exhibition in Rezan Has Museum
Go downstairs and enter a mystically lit vast space which houses Rezan’s collection. It’s called ‘Silent Witnesses’ and covers artefacts from the Neolithic period to the Seljuks. Furthermore, some excavated ancient city walls have been preserved and are integrated into the structure of the museum space.
Fantastic picture and history books are for sale and you can sit on a glass table and browse and read them as long as you wish even if you don’t buy them.
Admission to the museum is free, but photography is not allowed downstairs, even with the flash off. I could however take pictures of the photography exhibition and of the exterior of the museum.
Opening hours are from 9 am to 7pm every day (so this is one place to visit on a Monday when most of Istanbul’s more popular sites and museums are closed).
How to get there
Take the streetcar to Eminönü. Get off, cross under the Galata Bridge and simply walk along the shore of the Golden Horn, under the Atatürk Bridge and shortly after that you will see Kadir Has University on your left. Cross, walk past the main entrance to the university and you will find the museum. It’s a very pleasant walk as tourists tend to go in the opposite direction. Several parks border the Golden Horn and you can watch the ferries and fishing boats and take a rest on a park bench.
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