Knitting is Everywhere You Look

Whilst we were in Akcay, we visited a tiny little museum up a very steep hill. It turned out to be more than just a museum.

An ancient Turcomen hut recreated with real artefacts inside the gallery - complete with wooden spinning wheel

We drove up a winding little forest road - I admit I did shut my eyes at one particularly narrow curve - and arrived at a large stone house in a really quaint little village called Tahtakuslar (Village of Wooden Birds). It turns out that the owner, a retired schoolteacher and writer, donated his house and created this amazing ethnographic gallery.

World's largest exhibited leather-backed sea turtle, 360 kg - 197 cm.

It received a UNESCO award in 1994 and is rated 2nd out of the world's top 10 privately owned museums. It is also Turkey's first private Village Museum and houses the world's largest exhibited Sea Turtle (360 kg). An incredible achievement for an ordinary man with a love of his own surroundings. And if you ever go there, make sure you chat to Mr Selim Turan, the gallery's historian. He is so animated and so full of interesting facts from the Native Indians to China. He knows everything there is to know about superstitious beliefs in all cultures.

Here is the link: The Private Ethnographic Gallery of Tahtakuslar Village

And we can't have ethnography and traces of past life without yarn and fiber, can we? I just about resisted the urge to constantly do a jig in the museum each time I saw something knitted...

Simple knitted socks dating back 150 years (left). Kilim pattern socks, mother-of-pearl inlaid Turkish Bath clogs and silk embroidered slippers, 1880's (right). These would be carefully prepared for a trousseau.