Qualla: Antalya Museum

Antalya Museum: Introduction

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Carole Raddato from FRANKFURT, Germany, CC BY-SA 2.0. Süleyman Fikri Bey was watching his city's history disappear. After the First World War, Italian troops occupied Antalya, and Italian archaeologists began removing antiquities from the city center and from the area around their embassy, claiming they were saving them in the name of civilization. In 1919, Süleyman Fikri Bey, the Sultan's advisor, walked into the provincial governor's office and asked to be appointed voluntary curator of antiquities. He kept what he could in place. In 1922, he founded the Antalya Museum to give the surviving objects somewhere to go. The museum has moved three times since, but its mission has not changed: hold the Mediterranean coast's deep memory in one building.

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Image: Carole Raddato from FRANKFURT, Germany | CC BY-SA 2.0

Antalya Museum: From a Mosque to a Modern Wing

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bernard Gagnon, CC BY-SA 3.0. The first home of the museum, in 1922, was the Alâeddin Mosque. From 1937 to 1972, it lived inside the Yivli Minare Mosque, the Fluted Minaret Mosque whose tower is still one of the city's landmarks. The current building, in the Muratpaşa district near the sea, opened in 1972 and...

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Image: Bernard Gagnon | CC BY-SA 3.0

Antalya Museum: The Statues of Perge

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Carole Raddato from FRANKFURT, Germany, CC BY-SA 2.0. Most of the museum's marble heart comes from one nearby site. Perge, a wealthy Pamphylian city about 18 kilometers east of Antalya, has yielded an extraordinary run of Roman-era sculptures, and many of them now stand in the Hall of Imperial Statues. At the center of the room is P...

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Image: Carole Raddato from FRANKFURT, Germany | CC BY-SA 2.0

Antalya Museum: Sarcophagi and Saint Nicholas

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dominator1453, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Sarcophagus Hall holds Roman tombs from Pamphylia and Sidemara, including a Heracles sarcophagus carved with the Twelve Labors and a Dionysus sarcophagus in the Attic style. Each face was a small theater, telling the story the deceased's family wanted remembered. The Hall of ...

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Image: Dominator1453 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Antalya Museum: Karain Cave Backwards Through Time

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Saffron Blaze, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Pre-History Hall reaches back further than any of the imperial portraits. Antalya sits near the Karain Cave, a single limestone chamber that humans occupied continuously from the Paleolithic through the Roman age, one of the longest unbroken records of human habitation anywhe...

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Image: Saffron Blaze | CC BY-SA 3.0