Guide
Aşiyan was Tevfik Fikret's own house, and he drew the plans for it himself. It was finished in 1906 as a house with a garden near Robert College, where he taught, and he named it with the Persian word for 'nest'. He lived here from 1906 until his death in 1915. Fikret was one of the leading figures of the Servet-i Funun generation, which led the westernisation of Turkish literature.
İstanbul Metropolitan Municipality bought the house some time after his death and opened it on 19 August 1945 as the Edebiyat-i Cedide Museum. In 1961 his remains were moved here from the Eyüp cemetery, into the garden whose natural setting he had loved, and the museum took the name Aşiyan from that point.
The building is wooden and has three floors, of which the ground floor is now offices. The first floor holds three rooms: the Edebiyat-i Cedide room, with photographs, books and personal effects of that literary circle; the Abdulhak Hamit salon, with his belongings, paintings, photographs, desk and armchairs; and a room for the woman poet Nigar Hanım, with her books, photographs, pictures and personal archive.
The second floor is Tevfik Fikret's own. His bedroom holds his personal things, the bed he died in, and a copy of the death mask taken from his face by Mihri Hanım. His study holds his desk and chair and paintings he made himself, and — the single most famous object in the house — the painting 'Sis' (Fog) that Şehzade Abdülmecid Efendi made after Fikret's poem of the same name.
Visit status for this record: open to visitors.
