In part of the Kurşunlu Külliye is housed a museum showing the towns specialty, Lületaş, elsewhere known with the German word Meerschaum, a magnesium and silicon-based mineral, that is both lightweight and porous and moisture-absorbing. It seems to be ideal for the making of pipes, but can be worked into all sorts of objects. Some of these I show here. I failed to note the names of the makers and what they represent (well, the Laocoön Group was obvious, tens of times smaller than the original this was not a bad copy). So you just see for yourself.

I apologize for the sometimes very shallow depth of field.

The region some 30 km southeast of Eskişehir has the largest deposits of meerschaum in the world. The local trade of carving this mineral on a large scale began in the 1920s, although there are reports of Ottoman meerschaum objects (and also from other countries) some centuries earlier. The first recorded use of meerschaum for making pipes was around 1723, in Hungary.

Correspondent: J.M.Criel, Antwerpen.
Source: (amongst others) Wikipedia.