The Istanbul Toy Museum itself is pretty small and devilishly hard to find, but it's definitely worth visiting. If you are ever in Istanbul, make sure to drop by, preferably by taxi, because we spent, like, an hour searching for it. It's in a nice and quiet neighbourhood on the Asian side, and can be easily recognized by the gigantic giraffe right in front of the entrance. Anyway, it's small, but filled with all sorts of toys arranged into collections accoring to the topic or the era or the country they were manufactured in.
For example, antique Turkish puppets Karagöz and Hacivat.
Cowboys and Indians toys from America.
Aviation toys with tiny parachuters here and there.
Aquatic themed toys
I especially like the crafty metal whale here swallowing the smaller fish.
And tons of space toys with a real feel of the era - note the Gagarin Time cover.
By the time you come up the tiny winding stairs to the third floor, you think that you've seen all the toys in the world and will never be interested in them ever again. And that's exactly the place where you find yourself face to face with the Teddy Bear room.
So, alright, teddy bears, most of them not as cuddly as the ones we are used to. That's alright. But then you see these two little numbers: black, wonky and grave.
These are the Titanic Teddy Bears, or the Mourning Teddy Bears, manufactured specifically to commemorate the Titanic disaster and to provide some sort of comfort to the families of those who didn't survive it. The original party consisted of only 600 bears, which I find quite strange compared with the number of mourning families. And, by the way, they are going to recreate them this year.
Hiç yorum yok:
Yorum Gönder