Archaeological Museum (Istanbul)

ARCHAEOLOGICAL MUSEUM (ISTANBUL)

a major museum complex of three pavilions.

The pavilions are the Çinili Köşk (Tiled Pavilion), which, as its name indicates, is where Turkish tiles and ceramics are displayed; the Museum of the Ancient Orient, which houses mostly Hittite and Mesopotamian antiquities; and the Archaeological Museum building, which displays classical artifacts.

The Archaeological Museum building, commissioned by the first museum director in Turkey, Osman Hadi Bey, was opened to the public in 1891. The Museum of the Ancient Orient had been first founded as the Academy for Fine Arts in 1883.

Originally the Çinili Köşk housed the Ottoman collection. The spectacular discovery of a large number of sarcophagi at the Royal Necropolis at Sidon, Lebanon, in 1887, however, together with the growing Ottoman interest in the empire's antiquity-rich hinterland, necessitated the creation of a new space. These factors led to construction of the Archaeo-logical Museum, first named the Museum of Sarcophagi. Important architectural elements of the museum's design were inspired by two of its most famous sarcophagi—the Alexander Sarcophagus and the Sarcophagus of the Mourning Women.

The Archaeological Museum houses some 45,000 pieces: Of these, 9,000 are stone objects; 12,000 are pieces of pottery; 10,000 are terra-cotta figurines; 10,000 are metal objects; and 3,000 are glass objects. A shortage of space allows only a small portion of this collection to be displayed at any one time. The museum has a library that contains approximately 80,000 books covering a wide range of topics. The museum also has an enormous cuneiform tablet collection (about 75,000 pieces) and a rich coin collection (about 760,000 coins).

Karen Pinto