Guide
The Bakibey mansion in the Değirmenler quarter of Burdur is one of the finest surviving examples of seventeenth-century Ottoman domestic architecture in the town. It has two storeys of timber and thick solid mudbrick walls rising from a stone foundation that continues up the ground floor as far as the window sills. The upper floor has a wide iwan looking onto the garden and the side lane, and the spaces between the laths of its ceiling are painted with green and red earth colours. The gabled roof is covered with pantiles.
On the east side of the iwan is the selamlik, the principal room, and this is what people come to see. From the door of that room onwards, everything is decorated with gold and silver leaf and painted ornament: the windows, the stained-glass windows above them, the cupboard doors and the niches over them, the hood of the fireplace, the mouldings running above the windows, the doors of the bedding closet, the cornices that run round all four sides, and the ceiling with its central rosette. The combination of the gilding and silvering with the woodwork and the painted decoration produces a principal room of a quality rarely found. Beyond it are two small rooms, side by side, opening onto the iwan and into one another.
