Museum

The Bilecik Museum has an unusual home: a building that began in 1794 as a two-storey gendarmerie post, with a prison on the lower floor. It was burnt to a ruin during the Greek occupation of 1921–22, then rebuilt on its old foundations after the War of Independence, with a court upstairs and cells below.

It stayed a prison until 1995. After restoration between 1997 and 2006 it opened as a museum in April 2007, first as a branch of the Söğüt Museum and, since 2010, as a directorate of its own. Its yards, cell blocks and workshops give the rooms a character no purpose-built museum has.

Inside, the archaeology display runs from the Neolithic and Chalcolithic through the Bronze Age to Hellenistic, Roman and Eastern Roman times. You will see war tools, ceramics and glass, along with images showing how the Ottoman state took shape around Bilecik. An ethnography hall covers life in camps and at home.