Guide
The mansion stands in the Karagöl quarter of central Ardahan, on the road out to Göle. It is a single-storey rectangular building in the manner the directorate calls Baltic architecture, a style built densely in this region.
Its outer face, running north to south, is of neatly cut basalt ashlar ornamented with engaged columns; the other faces are of rubble. Inside, as in typical examples of the style, the rooms and halls open one into another. Buildings of this kind were heated by the stove known locally as a peç.
An Ottoman Turkish inscription dated 1911 was added later above the entrance door. Because the first and second congresses of the Ardahan National Council met in this building on 3–5 and 7–9 January 1919, the directorate reads the added inscription as a sign that the house was already in use as an official headquarters before those dates.
Having served as the congress building of those councils, the mansion holds an important place in national history. In the early years of the Republic it was used for a time as a government building.
The house is registered today in the name of the public treasury. It was protected by decision of the Erzurum Board for the Protection of Cultural and Natural Property on 4 November 1994. For many years it served as the Ardahan state hospital, and during those years a two-storey reinforced-concrete hospital wing was added on the northern side. After 1994 the historic mansion and that wing were transferred to the provincial health directorate and used as its offices.
In September 2000 the ministry's directorate general of monuments and museums asked for the house to be examined and for information on its registration and ownership; the account above comes from the report prepared in answer.
