Gorgo Medusa Glass Museum

The Gorgo Medusa Glass Museum, which opened on 21 June 2008 in a historic Antep stone mansion on Şakir Sokak in the Seferpaşa neighbourhood at the very foot of Gaziantep Castle, held the distinction of being Turkey's first private glass-artefacts museum.

History and Building

It grew out of the personal collection of Füsun İşsever, who from the 1990s spent roughly fifteen years gathering pieces mainly from the Adana-Osmaniye-Antakya area and the Yozgat-Çorum-Çankırı region; when the objects outgrew the family home, a traditional mansion was restored to house them. With its inner courtyard, arched openings and cut-stone façade, the classic Antep house architecture offered an elegant frame for the light-catching translucence of the ancient glass on display.

The Collection

The collection ranged between roughly four thousand and six thousand objects. About seventy percent consisted of Roman, Byzantine and Islamic-period glass vessels, bottles, oil lamps and coloured Phoenician glass amphorae; another twenty percent comprised Early Bronze Age bronze figurines and terracotta pieces; and the remaining ten percent held Roman and Islamic gold-and-bronze coins and jewellery.

Because its glass spanned an unusually wide arc from the 6th century BC to the 12th century AD, the museum was valuable to visitors wishing to trace the technical evolution of glassmaking, and it was long cited as Turkey's most comprehensive private collection after that of Rahmi Koç.

The complex was more than exhibition halls: it also contained an antiques sales room, a silver filigree (telkari) workshop, a mosaic-making room and a glass-bead and blowing atelier where guests could watch craftspeople produce copies using traditional blowing techniques.

Closure and Current Status

Agencies favoured this stop because it sat directly on the Coppersmiths' Bazaar and Zincirli Bedesten walking axis beside the castle, and because its dense yet distinctive content could be absorbed quickly. The average visit lasted forty-five minutes to an hour, serving as the cultural pause of the old-town core tour.

However, after eleven years of operation the museum closed in 2019 owing to financial difficulty and low visitor numbers; some two thousand of its artefacts were transferred to the Gaziantep Archaeology Museum, while the rest returned to the collector's private keeping. When planning a route today, groups wishing to see the glass collection should therefore be directed to the Gaziantep Archaeology Museum, while the mansion itself is best treated as an architectural waypoint on the historic-core walk.