“Cars of Mardin


From the 1950s on, cars imported from the USA and Europe were purchased all over Turkey, and prominently in the major cities. One of the first foreign car brands in Mardin was the Kaiser-Frazer of Michigan. However, this car with its low-lying chassis was not suitable for Mardin’s pitted, bumpy dirt roads, and Chevrolet and Ford models soon replaced the Kaiser-Frazers. Freighters from the USA brought the cars to the Iskenderun Port where their owners would be waiting. The Iskenderun Port was the gateway to the world for Adana, Gaziantep, Diyarbakır, Mardin, the other provinces of south east Turkey as well as the Middle East, Syria, Iraq and Iran.

Yahya Muin Özyardımcı and Chevrolet Deluxe

Yahya Muin was born in Mardin in 1913. The family was known as Muin, meaning the “supporters”, and they adopted the Özyardımcı (meaning real supporter) surname after the Turkish Republic enacted the Surname Code. From the 1930s on, Yahya Muin and his brother Salih were engaged in the transport and trade of American cars, trucks and buses of Ford, Mercury and DeSoto brands. Yahya went to the Iskenderun Port to get the brick colored car he had ordered from the Chevrolet catalog to operate as a commercial taxi. It had taken months for his car to arrive and when he went to Iskenderun to get it personally, he had to wait for a month for the arrival of the freighter. That one freighter had brought 12 Chevrolet cars, all to be delivered to Mardin, and they arrived at the city as a colorful motorcade. It is generally agreed that, in those days the price paid for an American car, 11,000-12.000 Turkish Liras was equal to the price of a two-storeyed mansion in Mardin. The original brick color of Yahya Muin’s Chevrolet was never changed. Its first license plate read MARDİN T- 00318. Thanks to it, Yahya Özyardımcı raised his nine kids, sending them to the best schools. He died in Mardin in 2007, and his children donated his car to the Dilek Sabancı Art Gallery at the Sakıp Sabancı Mardin City Museum in 2019.”

(sakipsabancimardinkentmuzesi.org)

Design process

First design option was to exhibit the car outside the building. The idea was putting the car into a climatized glass box under a special tensile membrane to protect it both from sun and sandstorms. In this solution there was no touch to the historical museum building. Due to monetary restrictions second option has been proposed which basically is to install the car inside the entrance space of the city museum by covering one of the staircases that goes down to the art gallery. Staircase is covered with tempered and laminated glass to let the visitors feel the symmetry and the continuation of the original building. Information panels, videos and old license plate of the car have been put on the wall by the car where visitors would walk over the glass flooring to get the information.

• Exhibition design
• Construction
• Installation
• Lighting