The Tahtacı — the name means something like 'woodworkers' or 'timber people' in Turkish — are a distinct Turkmen community historically associated with the forests of western Anatolia. They are Alevi Muslims, a branch of Islam with its own spiritual practices, communal gatherings called cem, and a deep attachment to the lineage of Ali. Settled in villages like Tahtakuşlar in the foothills of Kaz Dağı (ancient Mount Ida), they developed traditions — in music, textile arts, oral poetry, and ceremony — that reflect both their Oghuz Turkmen origins and the particular landscape of the Mount Ida region. The museum was built to document this living culture: not as something that has ended, but as something that deserves to be seen and understood on its own terms. The village of Tahtakuşlar sits in the Edremit district of Balıkesir Province, on the southern slopes of the mountain, close to the İzmir–Çanakkale highway near the town of Güre.

Alibey Kudar filled the museum with the material culture of village life as the Tahtacı lived it. Household furniture and domestic objects. Local attire — the particular cut and embroidery of Tahtacı clothing that distinguishes it from the surrounding regions. Rugs, woven in patterns particular to this community. Tents used by the community before permanent settlement. Amulets and ornaments that speak to the Alevi spiritual tradition. The collection is hands-on in the way that only a private, community-based museum can be — accumulated with the specific eye of someone who knows what each object meant. One unexpected exhibit draws comment from every visitor: a gigantic sea turtle shell, on display in an ethnography museum dedicated to a mountain community. Kudar clearly had an eclectic collector's instinct alongside his scholarly purpose.

In 1992, the museum expanded when the art gallery of painter and sculptor Selim Turan was added to the collection. Turan was a Turkish artist of the twentieth century whose work had international reach — he spent much of his career in Paris — and the presence of his gallery in this small mountain-village museum speaks to a broader ambition than pure ethnography. A library was established within the museum in 1994, giving researchers and students access to written materials alongside the physical collection. The combination of folk objects, Alevi cultural artifacts, fine art, and a library in a single private institution in a village of a few hundred people is striking. It reflects both Kudar's personal vision and the depth of cultural life that modest communities can sustain when someone decides to look carefully at what is there.

The museum sits southeast of the village, off the İzmir–Çanakkale highway, just a short distance from the town of Güre. The landscape here is quintessentially Kaz Dağı: the road winds through olive groves and pine-edged hillsides, with the forested ridges of ancient Mount Ida rising behind the village. The same mountain range that Homer gave to Zeus — where the gods watched Troy burn, where Paris judged three goddesses at a sacred spring — is the backdrop for this quiet act of cultural documentation. There is something appropriate in that. Kaz Dağı has been carrying the weight of other people's stories for three thousand years. The Tahtakuşlar Ethnography Museum makes room for the story of the people who actually live in its shadow.