MENA’s Weirdest, Wildest, Wackiest Museums

Well-adjusted adults go to museums for the history. Adults who grew up relating to Wednesday Addams go for the mummified reptiles. And across these seven museums in MENA, you’ll find mannequins and miniatures so unsettling, even Stephen King wouldn’t touch them with a ten-foot pole doused in holy water.  In Cairo, you can finally see all your favourite birds, bears, and big cats…nailed to a taxidermy display. If you happen to like dolls of the Annabelle variety, there’s an entire collection of murderous ones in Istanbul. And, for Rapunzel fans, you can find her hair—along with Ariel’s, Mulan’s, and even Gaston’s—strung up on the walls of a Cappadocia cave museum.  Now, if your childhood was more Cinderella than Saw, there are also a few that are can be considered humorous: a funky cheese museum, a gallery where cats hiss at you across different mediums, and one where all of Turkey’s monuments are shrunk down to accommodate Napoleon complexes.  Big or small, kooky or concerning, these museums prove that in MENA, weirdness, wildness, and wackiness are not only lauded, they rank higher than history on Tripadvisor. Cat Museum, Istanbul, Turkey Cats have long reigned over the side streets and sardine shops of Istanbul. They’ve heisted our (sea)food. They’ve kidnapped our pet fishies for sport. And now, they’ve finally come for our museums.  Built from 15 years of obsessive collecting by poet Sunay Akin, the Cat Museum in Istanbul bribes the city’s whiskered overlords with catnip-laden halls where they may be regularly revered—if only by puny humans.  Inside, you’ll find feline fairytales where cats lounge—uninterested—in the spotlight they were too lazy to fight for, comic books where they sneer at you in printed colour, and toys, posters, even artefacts that celebrate their historically favoured pastime: scratching up your brand-new BÅRSLÖV couch from IKEA. Chez Galip Museum, Avanos, Turkey A museum where you can finally let down...someone else’s hair?  Channeling Batman in both mystery and creepiness, Cappadocia’s Chez Galip Museum lives within a pottery workshop. Inside a cave. With waves, weaves, and wind-smacked curls in every corner and crevice but the floor… The collection, which was built on the backs of what I assume are now balding women, catalogues the owner’s 16,000 female admirers, each loving him and thankfully leaving him with the very same parting gift: the contents of their hairbrush. And, as is the norm in love and horror movies, each strand is tagged, named, and addressed, so the owner may never lose track of his 30 years of “just casual” coffee dates.  Miniatürk, Istanbul, Turkey  Miniatürk is what happens when a LEGO fanatic manages to wiggle their way into a position of actual power. One that allows them to audaciously decree: “We will build a museum,where all of Turkey’s landmarks are tiny. And it’s NOT because I’m 5’2.”  Here, you don’t just look at the miniatures. You walk through them like a lost rat in New York—mosques the size of shawarma spits, bridges built for chihuahuas, and ancient ruins so small they could fit in the pocket of a British Museum curator.  Istanbul Toy Museum, Istanbul, Turkey  It can only be assumed that Istanbul’s Toy Museum was inspired by—nay, directly modelled after—the childhood bedroom of one Freddy Krueger: lazy-eyed porcelain dolls, puppets that share cousins with Chucky, and what can only be described as a Mickey Mouse slaughterhouse fantasy.  The private collection of Turkish poet, writer, and M3GAN-enthusiast Sunay Akın, the museum’s toys—pinned to walls, dangling from ropes, and made to pose for strangers—are varied in their seniority, with some dating back to the 1700s.  In one room, you’ll bump into a mangled Charlie Chaplin that, months later, you’ll casually bring up in therapy. In another, a space display will jump-scare both you and that cousin who won’t shut up about Ancient Aliens. Finally, if you’re unlucky, you’ll catch a theatre act so chilling, it’ll scare the Labubu right out of your ten-year-old’s shopping cart.  Crocodile Museum, Kom-Ombo, Egypt You’ve had high-budget nightmares starring them. You’ve taken Miami off your bucket list on the off-chance you might brush slimy tails with them. And you’ve definitely never imagined seeing an entire mummified lineup of them in an Egyptian showroom: we’re talking about crocodiles.  These freshwater fiends have somehow managed to score themselves an entire museum, one that has everything from majestic crocodile-headed gods to Jurassic Park-style eyes, teeth, and surprisingly not-so-creepy fetuses.  And before the crocodiles’ lack of aliveness makes you feel bold, you might want to watch out for the ones still breathing—they’re waving from the island right across, knife, fork, bib, and Tabasco already in hand.  Agricultural Museum, Cairo, Egypt In many ways, this is a museum of the future. Not the one where we have robots that do the cooking, cleaning, and cloning. The one where we don’t suffer through enough paper straws to save the strawberries. Or the cucumbers. Not even the aggressively overrated Brussels sprouts. And so, ten years on, we find ourselves walking our kids past the Agricultural Museum’s farming displays—seeds, soils, the sort—and reminiscing about Caesar salads.  And for those who have never followed the dietary plan of a rabbit on Ozempic—and whose tastes more closely align with those of a carnivore—you can run across the museum’s 10 buildings until you find a room with hung up giraffe heads. Then another with Alfred Hitchcock’s favourite birds. There's even one where a polar bear shows off fangs that are just about the size of your well-fed thigh.  So, if you’re an avid taxidermist—or a vegan—definitely get yourself checked. Then book a ticket to this museum.  Kars Cheese Museum, Kars, Turkey If you’ve ever, in the presence of a big burrata or a mere Mini Babybel, conveniently forgotten about your lactose intolerance, you need to go to Kars. More specifically, you need to throw caution (and the Lactaid) to the wind, snatch a few stale breadsticks from the breakfast buffet, and head to their official cheese museum.  Start by sampling Kars’s famous gravyer cheese, the one that has dairy-chasers from around the world (France) fighting for the last cube. Then, once all the cheese has been gobbled down, you can pay the Parmesan piper and make yourself some more. Or, you can do as the Italians do, and just roll some over from your Bond villain wine cellar of cheese wheels.