Bandırma Museum

The Bandırma Museum has a story of civic pride behind it. Local people began building it themselves through a museum-support association and had raised it to the level of the basement when the project was handed to the Ministry of Culture in 1995. The ministry finished the work, and the museum opened in June 2003.

Its collections come from the ancient city of Kyzikos on the Marmara coast, from excavations at Daskyleion, and from the surrounding area. The stars are stone reliefs with human stories in them. A tomb stele of a man named Menedemos shows him hunting on horseback and reclining with his family; the sculpture carries the sorrow of the grieving wife. A drinking cup from a burial mound at Daskyleion shows athletes and trainers on one side, and Hermes leading a noble woman to the underworld on the other.

Look also for the marble relief of the Charites, the goddesses of joy, between Eros and Zephyrus, made as a farewell keepsake, and the gravestone of a young man who died at forty and paid for it himself, shown steering a boat.