Tokat Museum

Museum work in Tokat began in 1926, when a retired teacher started storing antiquities he had gathered in the Gökmedrese, a thirteenth-century Seljuk madrasa. As the collection outgrew it, the museum moved in 2012 to the Arastalı Bedesten in the city centre and officially reopened on 18 September of that year. A bedesten was a covered market for precious cloth and jewellery, and this one, probably fifteenth-century, has nine domes supported on pillars, with rows of small shops, the arastas, along its sides.

The central bedesten hall holds the archaeology. Tokat's past reaches back to about 4000 BC, and the displays draw on Maşat Höyük near Zile, the ongoing excavations at Komana, and rescue digs. Highlights include Hittite tablets, a Hellenistic sword and a Roman bronze group of Apollo, Poseidon, Nike and the gods' sacred animals. The coin collection is among the notable ones in Anatolian museums, built largely around a hoard of Anatolian Seljuk silver found at Niksar in 1982 and Ottoman and Venetian gold coins.

The western arasta is the ethnography hall. It includes the oldest dated Anatolian Quran known in a museum or library, from 1191, and ceramics from Tokat, which researchers rank as the fourth major Anatolian ceramic centre after Iznik, Kütahya and Çanakkale. You can also see a hand-block printing workshop and a coppersmith's shop. The front garden displays Roman grave stelae, sarcophagi and capitals, and Seljuk and Ottoman tombs.