Guide
Yahya Kemal, one of the founding figures of modern Turkish poetry, published no book in his lifetime. He lived seventy-four years and was famous from 1912, when he came back to İstanbul from Paris, through his conversation, his lectures and his poems — but his exactness about language and form kept him from putting a collection out. That is why this museum exists: when he died on the morning of 1 November 1958, his friend Nihad Sami Banarlı came to an agreement with the heirs and took the poet's papers into safekeeping.
Banarlı founded an institute for him within the İstanbul Fetih Cemiyeti, a society set up in 1950 to mark the five hundredth anniversary of the conquest and of which the poet had been a member, and ran it himself for many years. The institute kept the manuscripts, belongings and books preserved from the Park Otel, where Yahya Kemal lived on and off for about nineteen years, and as gifts and support came in the collection grew into a museum — the society describes it as the finest museum founded for a poet by private effort in Turkey.
The institute's other work is the reason the poems are readable at all. In its early years it published the three volumes of verse whose titles and contents the poet had settled himself, then his prose, arranged with a logic of its own; today's twelve-volume collected works were assembled from the handwritten drafts in the institute's archive together with what had appeared in print. Five volumes of the institute's journal have been published from archive material and conference papers, along with two compilations of writing about the poet prepared by Prof. Dr. Kâzım Yetiş, a former director. Conferences, panels and talks continue alongside the publishing, and there is a 360-degree online tour for anyone who cannot come in person.
