Guide
In 1923, with the population exchange agreed at Lausanne, the Mavridis family left Tekirdağ for Greece, and the Eşkinat family, arriving from Salonica, moved into the house they had left. Two children of those exchanged families — Dimitrios Mavridis and Ekrem Eşkinat — were, in effect, children of the same house.
Mavridis grew up in Athens. Moved by his father's words on his deathbed about our house in Tekirdağ, he spent fifty years researching the town, gathered hundreds of old photographs of it that exist nowhere else, and wrote twelve books about it. He searched for the family house for years, and on one of his visits he found a photograph of it and began looking for the building with that picture in his hand.
Eşkinat, years later, was researching old photographs of Tekirdağ when the signature beneath them led him to Mavridis. He went to the house in Athens and looked through a collection of some 1,500 photographs of Tekirdağ. It was during those visits that it emerged the two exchanged families had lived in the same house. Eşkinat told him the photographs had to come back: neither of us is a Turk or a Greek any more, he said, we are children of the same house.
The mansion was turned into a museum by the Süleymanpaşa municipality, and the reason this building was chosen is that Mavridis had lived here. His collection — more than 1,500 photographs of Tekirdağ spanning 150 years — was donated by him to the municipality.
