Guide
The mansion at the corner of Münzeviler Caddesi and Aydınlar Sokak in Çankaya was built by Abidin Paşa, governor of Ankara from 1886 to 1893, whose tenure left its mark on the city's infrastructure, schooling and cultural life. The house outlived him as a witness: it stood through the last Ottoman decades, the War of Independence and the early republic, and the municipality counts it among the most important buildings in Ankara's civic memory.
Its part in the war was not symbolic. When the military high school and the war college lost their own buildings to occupation, Mustafa Kemal assigned this mansion to the students himself, and the officer candidates' course opened here sent its graduates to the fronts of the War of Independence, where many of them were killed or wounded.
The museum now inside the house is thematic, taking as its subject Ankara in Abidin Paşa's day and the country's passage through liberation and foundation. Çankaya municipality describes it as one of the most modern museums in Turkey: the galleries are built around digital storytelling and three-dimensional presentation, with scarce period originals displayed alongside the digital sequences rather than replaced by them. The themed rooms follow the war chronologically, through its turning points and the people who shaped them.
