Qualla: Akhisar Museum https://qualla.com/akhisar-museum en-us © 2026 Bendyline Mon, 20 Jul 2026 10:21:30 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/s/w/g/v/akhisar-museum-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Akhisar Museum https://qualla.com/akhisar-museum Akhisar Museum: Introduction https://qualla.com/akhisar-museum/ Photo credit Pragdon, CC0. Ayşe Aloğlu built it in 1932 as a memorial to her son. Ali Şefik had died young from illness, and his mother used family money to put up a two-story hospital in his name on a quiet street in Akhisar, in western Anatolia. The hospital eventually became a school, then a residence for teachers, then the center of a local political fight in 2005 about why the government wanted to close it. After eight years of restoration, it reopened in 2012 as the Akhisar Museum. The 650 square meters of galleries inside hold pieces of Lydia, of Thyatira, of the Yortan culture, and of an Ottoman world of carpet looms and tobacco knives that was vanishing even as the building first opened its doors.

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]]> Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/w/g/v/akhisar-museum-wp/swgv-akhisar-museum-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Akhisar Museum: A Building That Kept Changing Jobs https://qualla.com/akhisar-museum/ Photo credit Pragdon, CC0. The Ali Şefik Hospital served the people of Akhisar through the early years of the Turkish Republic, then transferred to the Ministry of National Education at local request, with Ayşe Aloğlu's blessing. It became Ali Şefik Middle School and stayed one until 1992, when renovations...

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]]> Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/w/g/v/akhisar-museum-wp/swgv-akhisar-museum-a-building-that-kept-changing-jobs.mp3 0:06 2 full Akhisar Museum: Thyatira's Coins and a Gold Ram https://qualla.com/akhisar-museum/ Photo credit Pragdon, CC0. Akhisar sits on top of ancient Thyatira, one of the seven cities addressed in the Book of Revelation, and the museum's archaeology section is built around what the soil keeps giving up. Coins from Thyatira span every period from the Archaic to the Ottoman, an unbroken eighteen-ce...

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]]> Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/w/g/v/akhisar-museum-wp/swgv-akhisar-museum-thyatiras-coins-and-a-gold-ram.mp3 0:06 3 full Akhisar Museum: Tear Bottles and Lekythoi https://qualla.com/akhisar-museum/ Photo credit Pragdon, CC0. Some of the most affecting objects in the collection are also the smallest. The unguentaria, often called tear bottles, are slender clay vessels Romans placed in graves to hold perfumed oils and, the tradition went, the tears of mourners. The museum has a careful row of them, eac...

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]]> Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/w/g/v/akhisar-museum-wp/swgv-akhisar-museum-tear-bottles-and-lekythoi.mp3 0:06 4 full Akhisar Museum: Arasta https://qualla.com/akhisar-museum/ Photo credit Pragdon, CC0. The ethnography section ends in a smaller room called Arasta, which is the Ottoman word for the bazaar street where craftsmen worked side by side. The display reconstructs the trades that defined Akhisar in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: tobacco cultivation, with its bal...

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]]> Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/w/g/v/akhisar-museum-wp/swgv-akhisar-museum-arasta.mp3 0:06 5 full