Circassian Heritage Center

המרכז למורשת הצ'רקסית

Museum · Circassian heritage · Objects from the Caucasus · Traditional dress and weapons · Circassian dance · 10-700 ₪

Beit Shami, Kfar Kama, Kfar Kama

The heritage centre of the Circassian village of Kfar Kama in Lower Galilee, with the country's largest Circassian museum in a basalt house of 1903

The Circassian Heritage Center in Kfar Kama offers a guided tour of its Circassian museum, which its site calls the largest in the country, a sound-and-light show, a walk through the lanes of the old village, a Circassian dance show and a tasting of Circassian food, led by guides who live in the village. The museum fills four exhibition rooms of Beit Shami, a compound begun at the end of the 19th century on the edge of the village's first ring and finished in 1903, with homes, a grocery, a motor-driven flour mill and a two-storey building with a stable below and four guest rooms above, built of large basalt stones with Marseille tiles on the roofs. Among its hundreds of items from the Caucasus are swords and daggers more than 150 years old, a smoked cheese more than 40 years old made the traditional way, a baby's cradle, the traditional dress of men and women and musical instruments. Its tour of the old core takes in the mosque and the village's old houses, and its pages tell the history of the Circassians and their arrival in the Land of Israel in their own account.