Aşık Veysel Museum hosts visitors again

SİVAS - Anatolia News Agency

Guests at the opening ceremony posed with a beeswax statue of the poet Aşık Veysel in the room where he died. AA photo

Famous late Turkish folk poet Aşık Veysel’s museum house in the central Anatolian city of Sivas’ Şarkışla district has been restored and opened on Dec. 7 at a ceremony.

The museum house in the Sivrialan village has been restored as part of the “Intermuseums Cultural Alliance Project” carried out by the Synskadades Museum in Stockholm and the Sivas Museum Directorate.
Speaking at the opening ceremony, Şarkışla district Gov. Davut Gül said the buildings around the museum would be confiscated in the near future. “The museum will be more visible after the confiscation work.”
The Sivas Museum director, Ayşegül Canan Ortakçı, said an additional building was also under construction and would be finished within a short time.

She said the renovated museum had innovations for disabled people, and that they had placed 10 boards giving information about the museum and Veysel in the Braille alphabet. “People with a visual handicap will get information by touching the boards. We have also prepared a documentary on Aşık Veysel with sign language [interpretation]. Foreign visitors will also get information about him thanks to this film, which is shown on televisions in the museum,” she said.

Veysel’s younger son, Bahri Şatıroğlu, donated a reed his father had given to him for the museum to display. The guests at the opening ceremony posed with a beeswax statue of the poet in the room where he died.

The house of Veysel, who was born in 1894 in Sivrialan village and lost his visual ability at a very young age due to pox, was opened as a museum in 1982.