중동부유럽

Cultural attractions include museums, art galleries, festivals, ancient structures, historical and architectural monuments, heritage sites, artistic activities and demonstrations as well as religious trips, language characteristics, local and authentic values, olimpiads, clothing style, traditions, and food culture. As being one of the most important components of cultural tourism, the museums in recent years have experienced a change in their functions, increased the number of tourists and provided economic benefits in their regions by creating alternative destinations for tourism. For this reason the museums, the integral part of tourism, receive increasing investments and new museums are constructed with different functions and the presentation of different products to attract more visitors. This study was conducted to evaluate the development of the museums, to spatially analyze the number of museums, their visitor numbers and incomes by province, and to determine the contribution of museums to tourism in Turkey. The number of museums in Turkey obtained from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, TÜRSAB and TÜİK, the number of artifacts in these museums, the number of visitors to these museums and the subsequent revenues according to the spatial distribution in the provinces have been mapped with the Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and the spatial analysis (Standard Deviation Ellipse, Moran’s I, LISA) of the museum indicators has been carried out and the results evaluated. Although museums have long been studied in Turkey with their different characteristics, the studies concerning the use of museums for tourism are quite new. As seen from the number of museums and their visitors, the museums are not being used sufficiently in Turkey. Apart from a very limited number of examples such as Topkapı Palace, Hagia Sophia Museum, Konya Museum, and Anıtkabir, the museums in Turkey are not sufficient in terms of their qualifications and the number of visitors.