İzmir Atatürk Museum

Overview

Guide

The İzmir Atatürk Museum stands on the Kordon waterfront in İzmir and shows Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's belongings. It opened in 1941.

The building was put up in 1880 as a family house by Agop Ispartalıyan, a carpet merchant who became a deputy for İzmir after the constitution was declared in 1876. It was abandoned when the Turks retook İzmir in September 1922 and passed into state ownership, serving for a time as a headquarters of the Turkish army.

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk came to the city in February 1923 for the İzmir Economic Congress and used the building as his working office. After the congress the headquarters moved out and the state leased the building for use as a hotel. In June 1926 Atatürk stayed at that hotel, called the Naim Palas, with İsmet İnönü during a visit to İzmir. On 13 October of the same year the municipality bought the building and gave it to Atatürk as a gift. Between 1930 and 1934 he came to İzmir five times and stayed here on each occasion.

After his death on 10 November 1938 the house passed to his sister Makbule Atadan. The municipality expropriated it on 25 September 1940 and opened it as a museum on 11 September 1941, the nineteenth anniversary of Atatürk's entry into İzmir.

The museum's name was changed on 5 October 1962 to the Atatürk Provincial Public Library and Atatürk Museum of the City of İzmir. Ownership of the building passed to the İzmir Archaeological Museum on 28 December 1972. Rearranged and reopened on 29 October 1978, it took the name Atatürk and Ethnography Museum. When the İzmir Ethnography Museum opened on 13 May 1988 the ethnographic works were moved there and the name became simply the Atatürk Museum. The Ministry of Culture restored the building between 1999 and 2001 and the museum reopened in 2002; it was restored again between 2011 and 2015.

Built in a neoclassical manner and covering 852 square metres, the house also draws on Ottoman and Levantine architecture. It is a masonry building of two floors on a rectangular plan, with a basement and an attic as well. The rear face carries an arcade, and the house has a courtyard and a projecting bay.

Visit status for this record: open to visitors.