Discovered a thousands of years old bath cave under the museum filled with antiques

Hanifi Özaslan, who liquidated all his assets and invested in antiques, discovered a cave with a bathhouse beneath the house he converted into a museum. Living in Gaziantep and working as an antique dealer for 43 years, Hanifi Özaslan opened an antique shop by selling all his assets. Attracting the interest of the public with the antique items he had, Özaslan, who decided to turn the antique items he had been collecting since the age of 13 into a museum, restored his own house and turned it into a museum. Shortly after opening his house to visitors as a museum, he noticed a secret passage filled with soil beneath the house. Initially thinking it was just an ordinary basement, he discovered that this area was actually a cave with thousands of years of history, which was used as a bathhouse. The decorations and architectural structures on the walls of the cave reveal the artistic understanding of the period.
Hanifi Özaslan, the antique dealer who turned his building into a museum, stated that the building did not suffer any damage from the earthquake, saying, ‘When I first saw this building, it was for sale. Since I am involved in the tourism business, I decided to turn it into a museum. Although we initially had intense interest, we have been closed for 5 years due to the coronavirus and the earthquake. Our building did not suffer any damage during the earthquake. Some valuable items, totaling 1 million TL, which we displayed as glass, were broken’.
‘A cave with a room and a bathhouse was revealed’ Explaining how he discovered the cave, Hanifi Özaslan said it has the same history as the Gaziantep Castle. Özaslan said, ‘The cave was located under this building and was filled with soil up to half. Teams from Ankara, who also certified the cave, told us that we could remove the soil. When we cleaned it, a cave with a room and a bathhouse was revealed. The history of this bathhouse is the same as the castle because underground caves in the Turkish Tepe neighborhood of Gaziantep are known to be an underground city, and all of these are connected to the Gaziantep Castle. This cave we discovered was used by many states and many people in the past. I am planning to reopen this area and present it to visitors when tourism revives, showcasing Gaziantep’s history, underground city, and valuable antique items for tourists to see’.