Erzurum Museum

Erzurum's museum began life in 1944 in the Yakutiye Madrasa, moved to the Double Minaret Madrasa in 1947 and, after a new building was planned in 1964, opened in the Murat Paşa quarter in 1968. When the Yakutiye Madrasa reopened in 1994 as the Museum of Turkish-Islamic Art and Ethnography, this museum became purely archaeological.

The building has no historic value of its own: two storeys of cut stone in a garden of about 6,000 square metres. What matters is inside. The Excavations Hall shows finds from the region, notably from Karaz, Pulur, Güzelova, Sos and various tumuli, with small sculptures, sacred hearths, arrowheads, pottery and stone tools from the fourth millennium BC to Seljuk times.

Other halls cover Roman, Hellenistic and Trans-Caucasian cultures, including material from the İkiztepe tumulus and gold diadems, rings and earrings, glass tear bottles, terracotta and sarcophagi, then Urartu and natural history. Together they show how the cultures of eastern Anatolia lived, worked, worshipped and made art.