Guide

The building of the War of Independence Museum was designed in 1916, on the order of Enver Pasha, as a club house for the Committee of Union and Progress. The design was drawn by Salim Bey, architect to the administration of pious foundations. Mahmut Şevket Esendal Bey, then the committee's representative in Ankara, was given charge of carrying the project through, and the building work was entrusted to Hasip Bey, a military architect serving with the corps.

Hasip Bey completed the masonry successfully, but the roof and the remaining parts were left unfinished because of the war and the shortage of materials, and he himself was killed during the war of independence.

After the First World War, when Ankara was briefly occupied by British and French troops, a small French detachment took up quarters in the building, part of whose roof was still uncovered. They left it and quit the city when Mustafa Kemal Pasha arrived in Ankara on 27 December 1919.

When it was decided that the Grand National Assembly would open on 23 April 1920, no building in Ankara was found to be large enough or well enough equipped for the assembly to meet in. In those circumstances it was decided to use the unfinished club house as the assembly building, and Necati Bey — later a deputy for Bursa in the first parliament — was charged with repairing and completing it.

The building is of the local pink and purple andesite known as Ankara stone and is one of the first examples in the city of the First National Architectural style. It was finished through the sacrifices of the people: the tiles came from the houses of Ankara and from the model school at Ulucanlar, today the Cumhuriyet primary school.

It served as the Grand National Assembly between 23 April 1920 and 15 October 1924. Afterwards it housed the headquarters of the Republican People's Party and, for a short time in the same period, the school of law.

The building was transferred to the Ministry of Education in 1952. Work to turn it into a museum began in 1957 by decision of a ministry commission, and it opened to the public on 23 April 1961 as the Museum of the Grand National Assembly. After renewal by the Ministry of Culture within the programme marking the hundredth anniversary of Atatürk's birth, it opened again on 23 April 1981 as the War of Independence Museum, and a further protocol between the assembly and the ministry followed on 5 May 2009.