Çatalca Mübadele Müzesi

The Çatalca Exchange Museum is a small but dense museum on a side street close to the district square, in Kaleiçi, the old core of Çatalca. It is presented as Turkey's first museum devoted to migration and opened to visitors on 20 December 2010. Its subject is the compulsory population exchange between Turkey and Greece carried out under a convention signed in 1923 as an annex to the Treaty of Lausanne. The people subject to this exchange are called mübadil in Turkish, and most of the objects in the museum come from their families. According to the sources, the great majority of the exchange took place between 1923 and 1924. Çatalca stands right in the middle of this story. According to the history page of the Çatalca District Governorship, after the exchange the Greek Orthodox population of Çatalca left for Greece and founded a settlement there that they named Nea, meaning New Çatalca. Many families arriving from Greece, in turn, settled in central Çatalca and in the villages that had been emptied. The same page also notes that most of the district's people descend from those who arrived during the Balkan Wars, the First World War and the exchange. The museum therefore speaks less of a distant past than of the roots of the district's present population. The idea of a museum was among the very first goals of the Lausanne Exchangees Foundation, founded in 2001. In the years after its founding, the foundation saw Kaleiçi in Çatalca as the most suitable place for the project and signed a cooperation protocol with the Çatalca Municipality. The project was submitted to the Istanbul 2010 European Capital of Culture Agency in December 2008 and, after a long evaluation, was accepted in June 2010. The survey, restitution and restoration projects were prepared by two senior architects who were members of the foundation. According to the foundation's account, only about four months were left for construction, decoration and the exhibition layout, and the work was completed on 18 December 2010. The Culture Portal also writes that the museum opened within the European Capital of Culture programme, through cooperation between the foundation and the municipality. The museum consists of three parts, namely the main building, the exchange square and the culture house. The main building is a single storey structure that is easy to spot from the street, with red brick walls and tall arched windows framed in stone. According to the foundation, before the exchange the building belonged to a Greek Orthodox proprietor and was used as a business between 1913 and 1923. After the exchange it passed to the treasury, served for a time as a bank branch, was sold in 1961 and hosted sewing and tailoring courses in those years. The building has belonged to the same family since 1967, and the family has allocated it to the foundation for use as a museum. The Kültür Envanteri record likewise classifies it as a twentieth century structure of the shop type. Trousseau items take up the largest share of the display cases. Hand woven sheets, curtain fabrics with cross stitch work, pillowcases, tablecloths and embroidered decorations show what the most treasured belongings were that families managed to bring with them. The music section displays the oud of the Thessaloniki born composer Faiz Kapancı, together with a mandolin, a darbuka and a notebook of scores. Among the kitchen and household items are spoons with mother of pearl handles, copper dishes and trays, ewers, a porcelain tea set, earthenware jars, iron flat irons and oil lamps. The photography and documents section shows the camera used on the island by Hamza Rüstem Bey, counted among the first photographers of Crete, along with his glass negative plates. The same section holds documents from the exchange period, property liquidation claims filed by the exchangees, Ottoman era maps, old stamps and copies of a newspaper published at the end of the nineteenth century. Kültür Envanteri notes that ethnographic objects left behind by the Greek Orthodox residents who departed from Çatalca are displayed alongside the belongings brought by the exchangees. In this way the museum places both directions of the exchange side by side in one small space. The best way to see this museum is to read the labels next to the objects without hurry and to look at the dates on the documents one by one. The exhibition area is small, so the visit is short, yet time stretches by itself once the family photographs and the claim forms are studied closely. According to the foundation's page the museum is closed on Mondays; check the current opening hours and admission conditions on the foundation's website before you go. The Culture Portal states that Çatalca can be reached by buses departing from Yenibosna; confirm routes and timetables with the current information from İETT. After leaving the museum, a short walk through the narrow streets of Kaleiçi and around the district square is the easiest way to see the town where the exchangees settled. According to the District Governorship, Çatalca is the largest district of Istanbul by area and lies 56 kilometres from the city centre. Adding the remains of the Anastasian Wall to the north, or Çilingoz Nature Park on the Black Sea coast, to the day's plan combines history and nature in a single trip.