Guide
The Atatürk House Ethnography Museum stands on 459 Sokak in the Saraylar quarter of Denizli. There is no document establishing when the building was put up, but from what local people report it appears to date from the end of the nineteenth century.
In its outward form, its plan, the shape of its windows and its ornament the building is described as being in the Chios manner. It has two floors, laid out around a central hall with rooms opening onto it. The hall of the upper floor opens onto a projecting balcony at the front, which gives the elevation some movement, and at the back onto a section rising through both floors that appears to have been added later.
Apart from the cornices of the ground-floor ceiling and the decorative corner piers with moulded capitals and meander ornament that cap the wooden posts carrying the upper floor, the building has no decoration.
In the first years of the republic the building served as a party headquarters, and Atatürk was received here for one night on 4 February 1931 during his visit to Denizli. After 1950 it was allotted to the Ministry of Health and served for a time as a tuberculosis dispensary. In 1977 the Ministry of Culture registered it as a monument and took it under protection.
The building was repaired and its displays laid out between 1981, the hundredth anniversary of Atatürk's birth, and the end of 1983, and it opened as a museum on 1 February 1984. Worn by time, by its own construction and by where it stands, it was taken in hand for repair again at the end of 1997. After that work and a new arrangement of the displays it opened once more on 4 February 1999, the sixty-eighth anniversary of Atatürk's visit to Denizli.
Visit status for this record: open to visitors.
