Arnavutköy Local History Museum

The last train called at Hadımköy in 1985. A new tunnel had shortened the Istanbul–Edirne line five years earlier, and the station that had stood on the Ottoman Empire's rail link to Europe since 1872 was quietly stepped around.

The buildings stayed. Arnavutköy Municipality restored them and asked that they hold the district's history, which meant the museum's first exhibit would be the room the visitor was standing in.

A STATION TELLING ITS OWN STORY

The first building is the station. Upstairs were the lodgings of the stationmaster and the train superintendent; downstairs the passenger hall, the office, the larder and the store. When traffic grew in 1892 the ground floor gained separate halls for first- and second-class passengers and a salon reserved for women. A lodging went up beside the store in 1905. The plan is legible to anyone who knows where to look, and much of the exhibition's work is teaching visitors to look.

In collaboration with graphic designer Didem Ateş, we designed the displays to leave the rooms visible — cases and panels held off the historic fabric, lighting that reads the plaster rather than flattening it, and a model of the station at the centre so the whole compound can be seen at once from inside one small part of it.

The narrative runs from Baron von Hirsch's concession to the Orient Express, which passed Hadımköy without ever stopping; to an April morning in 1909 when a travelling professor borrowed his wife's camera on the platform and photographed two battalions waiting for the order to march on Istanbul; to the American Red Cross camps that sheltered White Russians here between 1920 and 1923. It closes in the republican decades, when the station handled soldiers, livestock, coal, firewood and melons, and its military importance thinned away.

THE COUNTRY AROUND IT

The second building leaves the railway for the land. Its displays are built in layers: a deep one that surfaces only two or three times across the whole route, then the nineteenth century of modernisation, war and population exchange, then the migration and urbanisation that made Arnavutköy what it is now.

The villages are gathered into clusters, each with its own evidence — population registers, an oral history recorded on tape, a reservoir photographed before and after, a mosque, a stele. One room is given to the Balkan Wars and to the cholera that came with them, reconstructed around the field hospital at Ömerli.

We joined the exhibition team at İstanbul Bilgi University's Centre for Cultural Policy and Management in December 2013 and worked through the design into 2015 — narrative structure, display units, spatial layout, lighting and sound, detail drawings, then supervision of fabrication and installation. The museum opened to visitors as the Arnavutköy Yerel Tarih Müzesi on 20 May 2022.