AT A GLANCE
Why go?
Turks Museum Nederland is a small, volunteer-run heritage museum in The Hague devoted to the story of the first Turkish workers who came to the Netherlands. Rather than ancient artefacts, its heart is the lived history of immigration: personal documents, photographs and letters that trace how a generation of guest workers built new lives far from home.↗↗
The idea was started in 2007 by a group of second-generation Dutch-Turks who wanted the experience of their parents' generation — the pioneering labour migrants — told and preserved for a wide audience. The result is an intimate, human-sized museum that visitors describe as a warm bridge between Turkish and Dutch culture, kept alive by the people who made it.↗↗
Good to know
- Heritage museum
- 5 kmfrom The Hague center
- 4.6 / 515 reviews
- The Hague
A museum of migration memory
The Netherlands' Turkish community began in the 1960s, when the first gastarbeiders — 'guest workers' — arrived to fill jobs in factories, docks and workshops, many eventually settling in cities like The Hague. Turks Museum Nederland was founded to make sure that ordinary, extraordinary story is not lost. Initiated in 2007 by a group of second-generation Dutch-Turks who wanted to tell the history of their parents' generation to a wider public, it is part archive, part family album and part community project.
