Güray Museum

Güray Museum, located in Avanos, Turkey, is the world’s first underground ceramic museum, carved 20 meters below ground. It features a rich collection of terracotta artworks spanning from the Late Chalcolithic period to the Ottoman era, as well as contemporary ceramic pieces by renowned Turkish artists. The museum also hosts an art gallery and offers workshops, making it a unique cultural destination in Cappadocia.

Planning your visit

Güray Museum is carved twenty metres underground in Avanos, and the location is the point: Avanos sits on the Kızılırmak river, whose red clay has supplied potters here for thousands of years, and Cappadocia's soft tuff allows the kind of excavation that produced the region's underground cities. The museum, opened in 2015, is the world's first underground ceramic museum, occupying tunnels and chambers cut into the rock.

The collection runs from Late Chalcolithic terracotta through Hittite, Phrygian, Roman, Byzantine, Seljuk and Ottoman ceramics, showing continuity in a craft practised in the same place across millennia. A contemporary gallery holds work by modern Turkish ceramicists, and the underground setting — cool, quiet, lit against the rock — suits the material.

Workshops are part of the offering, and Avanos potters still work the traditional kick wheel, which visitors can attempt.

Bookable options include entrance tickets with pottery-making sessions, and private tours with transfer, which matter because Avanos is one of the Cappadocian towns and transport between the region's sites is otherwise awkward. Making something on the wheel is what most visitors remember, however badly it turns out. Current availability is shown below.