Izmir previously has had several smaller museums, whose exhibits have now been enfolded into one much larger and nicer museum, and I had the privilege of seeing it before it was properly open to the public with Pinar, one of Tutku’s new guides. And it is very impressive. Yes there are still some signs that need to be finished, but most things are nicely in place already. This building you see above was once a tobacco factory, and our guide told us her grandmother worked in there for years. Well the smoke has cleared and now we have a pristine new museum that doesn’t smell like tobacco, and has proper climate control. It needs a few fixes, for example it needs non-glare glass on interiorly lighted objects, otherwise one only gets picture of your reflection imposed on the objects you are trying to photograph. But this is a minor and fixable problem. The museum has three floors, and the top floor is mostly about more recent Izmir history from the 20th century, including the Turkish revolution in the 1920s. Bibliophiles will mostly be interested in what is on the first two floors. For example, Smyrna=Izmir was a seaport town with lots of merchants coming and going. So we have the following exhibit…..
These boats carried grain and wine in amphoras, but also many other things including giant ingots of gold, silver, bronze, and copper, like the rusted out one seen below. Before there was a money economy, trade involved bartering and sometimes using precious metals as a means of exchange. 
The illustrations and murals in this museum are excellent, and here is one sample. Smyrna was the hometown of Homer, and so there is a nice exhibit with two illustrations taken from the Odyssey and the Iliad…..
But there is so much more to see in this splendid new museum.
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