From Workshop to Museum

Beypazarı is not only a touristic district for us, but also a place where we go often and watch its change. Every time we go to the town, we see that another workshop in the old bazaar closes and another shopkeeper is gone. One day we visited Beypazarı City History Museum. The building, which was built as a school in 1928, turned into a handicraft museum by the municipality in 1997. One of the arrangements in the museum belongs to the saddler Mustafa Atıcı.

When we took action to track down the saddlers still working in Beypazarı, we came across İbrahim. 59-year-old İbrahim Atıcı is Mustafa's son, whose wax model we saw in the museum. He learned the profession from his father, he has been working for forty-four years.While there were eleven saddlers in the city when his father was alive, now only he is left.

Donkey and mule are used only in mountain villages, and actually few of them are used. İbrahim Usta makes his living mostly by selling hardware materials. He has two daughters and two grandchildren with his wife Amile. Saddler İbrahim is an active social media user and shares all his moments via photographs.