20 Lira 125th anniversary of the foundation of the first museum in Turkey

The first museum in Turkey was established in 1891 within the Çinili Köşk — the tiled pavilion of Topkapı Palace — under the directorship of Osman Hamdi Bey, the painter and archaeologist who also drafted the Ottoman Antiquities Law of 1884 to halt the export of artifacts to European collectors. That legislation directly challenged the prevailing practice of foreign excavators removing finds wholesale, most notoriously the sarcophagi from Sidon that Hamdi Bey himself excavated and secured for Istanbul.