Guide
The Osman Hamdi Bey Museum is in the Eskihisar quarter of the Gebze district of Kocaeli, in the two-storey house where the painter spent his summers in the last years of his life. It has served as a museum since 1987. The source records that in 2021 it was allotted again to the provincial culture and tourism directorate of Kocaeli and that it remains closed until the restoration and the new displays are finished, so anyone planning to go should check before setting out.
The house stands on a hill running parallel to the shore, west of the centre of Eskihisar. The museum holds Osman Hamdi Bey's personal belongings, family pictures and a wide collection of full-size reproductions of his paintings. One of the rooms upstairs carries a presentation in which the moment of painting his Girl Arranging Flowers — the artist at work with his model — is recreated with three-dimensional figures.
Osman Hamdi Bey bought land in his youth at Eskihisar, then among the fashionable summer places, and in 1884 had a villa built there to a plan he drew himself. From that year he spent almost every summer here. He had a painting studio and a boathouse added to the villa and its outbuildings, and between 1901 and 1903 he painted flowers on the panels of the wooden doors of the ground floor; those paintings are held to be as valuable as his canvases.
During the First World War the villa was placed at the disposal of the headquarters commander. İsmet Pasha stayed here for a few days during the war of independence, and Atatürk stayed in the villa in 1933. A fire in 1945 burnt the wooden upper floor.
In 1966 the villa, with its outbuildings and its grove, was registered and expropriated by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. Repairs began in 1985 and the museum opened in 1987 — the 138th museum in Türkiye.
Until 2006 the museum came under the directorate of the Kocaeli Museum; in that year it passed to the metropolitan municipality and was laid out as a gallery museum, and it was later allotted to the Gebze municipality. Part of the painting studio in the garden was opened to the public as a workshop where amateur painters could work.
