Zeugma Mosaic Museum

The Zeugma Mosaic Museum in Gaziantep, Turkey, is the world’s largest mosaic museum, featuring approximately 3,000 m² of Roman and Late Antique mosaics from the ancient city of Zeugma.

Planning your visit

Zeugma was a wealthy Roman city on the Euphrates, and it was flooded. When the Birecik dam was built in the late 1990s, rescue excavation raced the rising water to recover what could be saved from the villas along the riverbank, which turned out to be mosaic floors of extraordinary quality — the city had been rich, and its floors were laid by first-rate workshops.

The museum in Gaziantep, opened in 2011, is the largest mosaic museum in the world, displaying around 3,000 square metres of Roman and Late Antique mosaic. The Gypsy Girl, a fragment showing a woman's face with an arresting sideways gaze, has become the emblem of the collection and of Gaziantep itself — and a section of it, looted and taken to the United States in the 1960s, was returned in 2018 and reunited with the rest.

Villa rooms are reconstructed with their floors in position, along with frescoes, statuary and fountains.

Gaziantep is also one of Turkey's great food cities, which most visitors discover with pleasure.

Bookable options include museum tours and formats combining the museum with the local markets and food culture. Current availability is shown below.