Guide
There is no inscription and no contemporary source telling us when this building on Bekirpaşa Caddesi was put up or who paid for it. What is said is that a Greek tradesman built it as a draper's shop, and that from the 1930s to the 1980s the newspaper Yeşil Giresun used it. It was restored at the end of the 1990s and opened as an exhibition hall under the name Can Akengin Art Gallery.
The building is masonry, one and a half storeys. Cut stone was used for the lintels, jambs, mouldings and pediment and rubble stone elsewhere. Three of its faces are blind; the front, looking south-west, is given an elaborate treatment.
At the middle of the ground floor the entrance has a straight lintel stone with windows on either side. The door jambs take the form of slender columns carrying three garland motifs each, and the opening is finished by a profiled cornice above the lintel. On either side of it are square triple window openings, their cut-stone frames with bases and capitals under a plain cornice. A wide profiled stone moulding marks the change from the ground floor to the first.
The middle section of the upper floor is cut stone, with four round-arched windows whose jamb colonnettes again carry three garlands each; the remaining windows repeat the arrangement of those below. At the centre of the front, under a profiled stone cornice, stands a cut-stone pediment — an upright rectangle braced at the sides by decorative stone buttresses and finished above by a semicircular crest, its face worked as a pair of round-arched niches.
Inside, the space is plain. The ceiling is carried on two stone piers, square in section with chamfered edges, and the basalt walls have been left with their joints pointed and exposed. The mezzanine is wooden, and the double metal door that opened from it to the south-west was closed up later.
