Zonguldak Mining Museum

Zonguldak is Turkey's hard-coal capital, and this museum, opened on 9 December 2016, was the country's first mining museum. It stands in the city centre on a plot of about seven thousand square metres and consists of around a thousand square metres of indoor exhibition space, an open-air display area, galleries running about seven hundred metres and the educational facilities of the Turkish Hard Coal Institution.

The foyer is designed around the slogan Zonguldak, Capital of Labour and shows how mining shaped social life. Items include radio-house equipment of the state coal enterprise, records, film projectors, championship cups of the local Kömürspor club, a memory book of the ÇATES power plant, and a scale and cash register from the Merkez Ekonoma, the store where miners could shop at lower prices. The ground-floor hall summarises the history of mining in Turkey and has a model called Zonguldak Basin, made by apprentice students.

On the first floor you meet underground survey instruments, rescue and digging gear, protective equipment, tools, accident and occupational-disease risk material, coal washers and statistical yearbooks that explain how mine work is divided. The second floor explains how coal forms, what conditions and how much time it needs, using kiosks and projections. Fossil leaves, branches and trunks are shown, and a product tree shows the many uses of coal as a raw material.