Sunay Akın opened the Istanbul Toy Museum on April 23, 2005, choosing that date deliberately: April 23 is National Sovereignty and Children's Day in Turkey, a public holiday that Atatürk dedicated to children in 1920. The founding of a toy museum on that date was not accidental. The museum occupies a building in the Göztepe neighborhood of Kadıköy, on Istanbul's Asian shore — a residential neighborhood far enough from the tourist circuits of the old city to feel genuinely local. The ground floor houses a recreation of the Eyüp Toy Shop, a famous toy retailer that closed in the 1950s, reconstructed here as both homage and exhibit. In 2012, the museum was nominated for the European Museum Academy Children's Museum Award.

The collection spans nearly two centuries of toy-making from multiple continents. Mechanical toys from the Ernst Paul Lehmann factory — a German maker celebrated for its ingeniously engineered tin toys — appear alongside hand-carved wooden animals, pressed-tin automata, and dolls in period dress. A dollhouse depicting a butcher's shop from Germany around 1900 captures daily life in extraordinary miniature detail: the hanging meat, the wooden counter, the tiny scale. Figurines of American presidents stand in careful sequence. There is a toy airplane modeled on a Lockheed P-38, the same aircraft type in which the French author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry disappeared over the Mediterranean in 1944 during a reconnaissance mission. The range is dizzying — and deliberately so. Akın collected across borders and eras, treating the toy not as a national artifact but as a universal one.

What distinguishes the Istanbul Toy Museum from many toy collections is its curatorial ambition. The displays are organized not just by type or country of origin but by the emotional registers toys engage: fear, wonder, imitation, aspiration. A toy soldier from 1930s Germany and a toy automobile from 1950s Istanbul share something beyond their material — they both record what a child's world looked like, and what adults decided children should think about. The museum has been particularly thoughtful about the darker chapters of toy history: items from Germany during the National Socialist period are presented with careful contextual labeling, not hidden or sanitized. A toy can be a mirror of ideology as readily as it can be a mirror of joy.

The museum's location in Göztepe places it in one of Kadıköy's quieter residential districts, easily reached from Kadıköy's central ferry pier and market streets by a short journey. Kadıköy itself — the Asian Shore's busiest and most characterful neighborhood — offers an experience of Istanbul that differs meaningfully from the historic peninsula. The street food is excellent, the covered market is local rather than tourist-oriented, and the waterfront promenade facing the old city and Sultanahmet is one of the better places to understand Istanbul's geography visually. The toy museum at Dr. Zeki Zeren Sokak 17 is open on weekdays (except Mondays) from 09:30 to 18:00, and on weekends from 09:30 to 19:00.

In 2005, when Sunay Akın opened this museum, Istanbul had no shortage of world-class cultural institutions — the Archaeological Museum, the Topkapı Palace, the Pera Museum, the Istanbul Modern. A toy museum might have seemed a minor addition. It has turned out to be something else: a place that makes a quiet but serious argument about the relationship between childhood, culture, and history. Objects that were once handled by small hands, dragged across floors, lost under beds, repaired and re-repaired, now rest behind glass. Their survival is partly accident and partly someone's decision that they mattered enough to keep. The museum is that decision, curated by a poet who understood that the smallest things sometimes carry the largest meanings.