Guide
The Gazi Museum stands in the İlkadım district of Samsun, in the hotel known as the Mantika Palas, where Mustafa Kemal stayed on his first arrival in the city. The building was restored and opened to visitors as a museum in 1940. It is a two-storey historic structure of some 509 square metres, with outer walls of masonry brick and inner partitions of lath and plaster, and draws around a hundred thousand visitors a year.
The building was put up as a hotel in 1902 under the name Mantika Palas — by Jean Ionnis Mantika according to some accounts, by Yanko Abacıoğlu according to others. In May 1919, word reached Osman Bey, the head of the special accounts office of the Canik district, that Mustafa Kemal, inspector of the Ninth Army, was coming to Samsun, and he set about finding the delegation somewhere to stay. He came to terms with the owner of the hotel next door to his own house, which was then out of service, and began putting it in order, bringing bedsteads from the military hospital and bedding from his own home to furnish the rooms, the hall and the kitchen.
Mustafa Kemal stayed at the hotel until 25 May 1919, carrying on the work of the national struggle there before leaving for Havza.
In 1926 a delegation led by the governor of Samsun, Fahri Bey, bought the building so that its key might be given to Mustafa Kemal Pasha as a memento of that day. The key was handed to him in İstanbul on 12 June 1926 on behalf of the people of Samsun.
Atatürk stayed at the hotel again after the republic was declared, from 16 to 18 September 1928 and from 22 to 26 November 1930. On the first of those visits he wrote a few lines in a notebook now displayed in the museum, noting that he was in the writing room waiting for İsmet Pasha, that this was his third time in Samsun, and that he was reading the date of his first arrival — 19 May 1335 — from the lid of the long cigarette box on the desk in front of him.
The hotel passed to Atatürk himself in 1924 and, on his death in 1938, to his sister Makbule Hanım under the terms of his will. Until then it had been used as a building of the Republican People's Party. The municipality of Samsun expropriated it in 1939 to make it a museum, and opened it to the public on 5 October 1940.
