Guide
Adam Mickiewicz — poet, dramatist, patriot, author of the Polish national epic and the central figure of Romanticism in Polish literature, compared by the ministry to Byron and Goethe — died in İstanbul on 26 November 1855. He had come to the Ottoman Empire that September to organise a Polish regiment to fight Russia in the Crimean War.
One thing to know before visiting: the house is not the original. On 8 November 1855 Mickiewicz, Armand Levy and Henryk Sluzalski rented a small house from a woman named Rudnicka at the corner of Yeni Şehir and Kalyoncu Kulluk streets, and he died there eighteen days later. The great fire of March 1870 destroyed almost all of Pera, that house included. In the same year a Polish aristocrat, Jozef Ratynski, bought the plot from the İstanbul municipality and built on it an exact reconstruction of the house that had stood there. The museum today is at the corner of Tatlı Badem Sokak and Serdar Omerpasa Caddesi.
The house was turned into a museum in 1955, the centenary of the poet's death, in cooperation with the Polish Ministry of Culture and Art. It holds information and documents on his life and work, photographs from his time in İstanbul, and material on the Polish struggle for independence. In the basement is a symbolic grave; the actual burial is in Krakow.
