Atatürk spent one night in this house on 4 February 1931, during a visit to Denizli, and it is now the town's Atatürk House and Ethnography Museum. It stands on 459 Sokak in the Saraylar quarter. Local accounts put its building in the late nineteenth century, and its exterior, plan, window forms and ornament place it in what is called the Chios manner: two storeys, with rooms opening off a central hall on each.
The hall of the upper floor opens onto a projecting balcony at the front, which gives the elevation some movement, and at the back onto a section rising through both floors that appears to have been added later. Apart from the cornices of the ground-floor ceiling and the decorative corner piers with moulded capitals and meander ornament that cap the wooden posts carrying the upper floor, the building has no decoration.
In the first years of the republic the house served as a party building, and it was then that Atatürk was a guest here. After 1950 it was allocated to the Ministry of Health and worked for a time as a tuberculosis clinic. The Ministry of Culture registered it as a monument in 1977, repaired and fitted it out between 1981 — the centenary of Atatürk's birth — and the end of 1983, and opened it as a museum on 1 February 1984.
The object to look for is a banner, given to the museum by Haluk Muftuler in 1984. It is embroidered in gold thread on red satin. The front carries the Ottoman phrase 'Long live the homeland' across the top and the Ottoman imperial arms in a wreath at the centre, with three star-and-crescents, one above and two below. Along the bottom runs an inscription recording it as a keepsake of the 24th conscript class, 2nd Battalion, 67th Regiment, from the Head Mosque at the flour market in the Denizli bazaar. The reverse carries the basmala, the profession of faith and Qur'anic verses of victory, with a star and crescent in each upper corner and metal-thread fringing at the edges.
What makes it the museum's most important piece is a single morning. On 15 May 1919, the day İzmir was occupied by Greek forces, the mufti of Denizli, Ahmet Hulusi Efendi, made his historic speech under this banner at a protest meeting in Denizli's Bayramyeri and called the town to resistance — the first response anywhere outside İzmir.
Visiting hours
- Visiting hours
- Summer (1 April – 30 September) 08:00–20:00, closed Monday · Winter (1 October – 1 April) 08:00–17:00, closed Monday
When to go
- Climate
- Across Denizli as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 6 °C in January to 27.5 °C in July; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in May, June, September and October; rainfall is heaviest in January (90 mm) and lightest in August (11 mm). Long-term means for 1957-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
