Guide
The Terzizade Konağı in Havran is a mansion reckoned to be more than two hundred years old, and the provincial authorities describe it as one of the grandest pieces of civil architecture of its day — a type they say is otherwise met with among the waterside houses of the Bosphorus. Its place in local memory comes from one visit: on the tour of the country Mustafa Kemal made just after the republic was proclaimed, he stayed here, and it was in this house that he met Seyit Onbaşı, the Çanakkale gunner, for the second time. The building was restored by the Balıkesir metropolitan municipality and turned into a museum together with the municipality of Havran.
The museum is arranged over two floors and follows that meeting. Glass prints of Atatürk and of Saadettin Bey, the mansion's owner, stand at the entrance, and the first section carries photographs of the stops between his arrival in Balıkesir on 6 February 1923 and his coming to the mansion in Havran. Beyond it are rooms given to Seyit Onbaşı, to the first encounter between the two men, and to the balcony from which Atatürk greeted the townspeople; wax figures have been placed in the corner where the two drank coffee. Alongside the meeting itself, the house also keeps traces of how a mansion of this kind was lived in.
