This paper examines four archaeological and ethnographic museums in the provinces of Turkey that were designed by Erten Altaban, a female architect. While these museums have long been neglected and even viewed as a sign of Turkey's failure to preserve its cultural heritage, it is possible to view the erratic structure of these museums as the metaphoric reflection of a fragmented memory project, rather than a clear and unambiguous one. According to Foucault, ‘What is found at the historical beginning of things is not the inviolable identity of their origin; it is the dissention of other things. It is disparity.’ Refusing to face the disparity, the Turkish modernizers created a historical discourse based on a search for a pure origin. The conflict between the imagined and the existing memories led to a troublesome historiography in which what to remember and what to forget was contested. Because of the controversy about what would represent the national identity, the official discourse has never been certain, although it maintained a hegemonic attitude that excluded the non-Turkish and non-Islamic components. Based on the theories of cosmopolitanism and feminism, this paper points out that the abandoned spaces of these archaeological and ethnographic museums contain the potential to draw attention to what has been forgotten within the official historiographies. Differing from the existing scholarship that primarily focuses on the central museums and views them as direct representations of dominant historical narratives, this study points at the peripheral structures as conveyers of the memories that were left out of the prevailing accounts.