The idea of establishing a museum in Ödemiş, which is located on a fertile valley lying among the mountains Bozdağlar in the north and Aydın in the south is irrigated with Küçük Menderes river, first emerged in 1974. The first concrete step towards that end was taken when during the 1975 – 1976 period Mutahhar Başoğlu, a collector himself, donated two plots of land totalling 2772 square metres to the Treasury, to be used as a museum building.
This land was allocated to the General Directorate of Ancient Works and Museums of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism on 4.1.1977 by the Ministry of Finance. The General Directorate started the construction of the museum within the same year and it was completed in 1983. Before Ödemiş Museum came into being, the items from the area were being kept and cared for at İzmir Archaeology Museum and the Tire Museum. They were later transfered back from both museums. In order to achieve chronological unity, the missing and needed archaeological and ethnographic items and coin samples were selected from various museums and transferred to the Ödemiş Museum.
The museum, which is designed in a tent form, has a basement and only one floor above it, and consists of a single hall. In the building which was originally conceived as an ethnographical museum, archaeological items from the environs are also displayed in addition to ethnographic material. The displays of the archaeological section are mostly from Old Bronze Age (3000 B.C) and Archaic (700 – 480 B.C), Classic (480 330 B.C), Hellenistic (330 – 30 B.C), Roman (30 B.C – 395) and Byzantine (395 -1453) periods. There are ceramics, idols, blades and axes, oil lamps, bronze pieces, glass pieces, ornaments, baked earth statuettes, and marble statuettes. There are also a total of 2545 coins in the archaeological section from the Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Seljuk and Ottoman periods. The ethnography section contains various weapons, copper and silver items, glass pieces, ornaments, embroderies, and costume samples, mostly belonging to the Ottoman period. There are also examples of handicrafts from the Republican period of Turkey.
There is a total of 4458 items at the Ödemiş Museum. A group of archaeological and ethnographic material was donated by the collector Muhtar Başoğlu, some were purchased and other confiscated items.
İzmir – Tire Museum Directorate
The movable cultural assets are exhibited in two halls in the museum. In the Archaeology hall, sculptures, grave steles, marble table legs, marble and cooked earth sarcophagi, glass works, cooked earth oil candles belonging to the period between 3500 BC and 1100 AD, coins in chronological order, bronze oil candles, electron and silver coins and cooked earth small sculpture parts and child sculptures are exhibited. In the ethnography section, hand – written Koran – ı Kerims, writing sets, man and woman jackets, bed covers (ornamented with thread and silver), trousseau chests, bath clogs, bath and recovery cups, silver woman Jewellery, ceramics having European roots used in the Ottoman Period, war instruments of various terms, dervish and dervish lodge goods, Çanakkale ceramics, tables, carpets, kilims and stained glass windows are exhibited.
