Vernacular Legacies and Modern Visions: Sadberk Koç’s Collectorship

This article examines the collecting practice of Sadberk Koç (1908–1973), whose systematic engagement with Ottoman textiles and domestic artefacts culminated in the posthumous establishment of the Sadberk Hanım Museum, Turkey’s first officially recognised private museum. By foregrounding vernacular material culture – embroideries, garments, and household textiles embedded in everyday and ritual life – Koç’s practice complemented the broader heritage landscape of the early Republic, which, in its pursuit of modernisation and secularisation, placed greater emphasis on monumental architecture, modern painting and sculpture, and Western-oriented music and performing arts, while forms of vernacular domestic material culture, received comparatively little institutional attention. Drawing on archival inventories, oral histories, and family recollections, the study situates her ethos within intersecting narratives of gender, modernisation, and cultural policy. It also highlights the intellectual affinities and networks of mid-twentieth-century women collectors, whose practices reframed private acquisition as cultural stewardship. The museum’s subsequent development and its plans for expansion into a purpose-built complex illustrate the ongoing negotiation between domestic and institutional spheres, and between private initiative and public mission. By bridging vernacular and monumental, intimate and institutional, Koç’s legacy demonstrates how individual agency recalibrated national heritage discourses, ensuring that the textures of everyday life became part of Turkey’s cultural record.