The building that houses the Kandilli Earthquake Museum was constructed in 1934 as a laboratory for seismographic work, at a time when the observatory was systematically expanding its scientific capacity. For much of the twentieth century, instruments ran continuously in these rooms, recording the tremors that move through the earth beneath Istanbul. The restoration of the building was carried out by the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, while Boğaziçi University — which has operated the Kandilli Observatory since 1982 — designed the interior. The museum opened on June 21, 2006. Its formal name is the Museum of Kandilli Observatory and Earthquake Research Institute, though most people simply call it the Kandilli Earthquake Museum.

The museum's principal exhibits are the scientific instruments themselves: seismographs, meteorological devices, astronomical tools, and the various precision instruments that have accumulated on the Kandilli campus since the observatory began systematic research in 1911. Some of these objects are striking in their elegance — the beautiful, purposeful form that scientific instruments often have when built for careful measurement rather than mass production. Others are more modest but no less important. Together they tell a history of how earth science developed in Turkey across the twentieth century, and how the observatory's mandate evolved from weather forecasting and timekeeping to the specialized discipline of earthquake monitoring.

Among the most unexpected exhibits are the Kandilli manuscripts — a collection that reflects the observatory's roots in Ottoman intellectual life. On display are 32 of the 581 manuscripts in the Kandilli collection, accompanied by 1,369 books in Turkish, Arabic, and Persian on astronomy, astrology, mathematics, and geography. These texts span centuries of Islamic scientific tradition and remind visitors that the observatory's predecessors were not merely forecasting weather but participating in a much older conversation about the heavens, the calendar, and the nature of the earth. The manuscripts sit inside glass cases in the same building where, not long ago, seismographs were scratching waveforms onto paper rolls. Old knowledge and new instruments occupy the same rooms.

Istanbul is a city that has been severely damaged by earthquakes multiple times throughout its history. The North Anatolian Fault, which runs beneath the Sea of Marmara, is one of the most active strike-slip faults in the world. The Kandilli Observatory and Earthquake Research Institute — KOERI — is Turkey's primary center for monitoring and studying seismic activity, and the museum is the public face of that work. Walking through its rooms, looking at the seismographs and the manuscript collections and the photographs of past earthquakes, visitors are invited to understand something both scientific and personal: the ground beneath the most continuously inhabited city in Europe has always moved, and the people who live there have always needed to know when it will move again.