Baksi Museum

The Baksı Museum is sitting on a hilltop 45 kilometers from Bayburt, looking on to the Çoruh Valley in Eastern Black Sea region. This unusual Museum building that rises in Bayraktar Village, formerly known as Baksı, is a place where modern art and traditional handicraft cohabit. The Baksı Museum which covers 30 hectares of land and includes exhibition halls, a Warehouse Museum, workshops, a conference hall, a library and a guest house and came into being in as the brainchild and personal dream of Prof. Hüsamettin Koçan, an artist who is also a native of Bayburt. This museum is the result of Koçan’s efforts to transfer his lifetime achievement to his homeland. The Baksi Culture and Art Foundation came into being in 2005 to achieve this goal. Through years, the Museum transformed into a genuine social project thanks to the contributions from many volunteers, mostly artists. The construction of the main building of the Museum was completed in 2010 after a challenging adventure, without any government support and in June the same year, its promotion event was held in Istanbul Modern and it was finally inaugurated in July. In 2012, the Museum’s new exhibition hall, the Warehouse Museum was introduced to art lovers.