Guide
The Atatürk House and Ethnography Museum stands in the centre of Tokat, in a historic mansion where the Süsoy family lived and where Mustafa Kemal Atatürk stayed on his visits to the city as president. The house, a nineteenth-century building in the Devegörmez quarter, opened as a museum on 26 June 2007.
Built in the second half of the nineteenth century, it belonged to Captain Mustafa Vasfi Bey, who had served as a staff officer to Mustafa Kemal Pasha at Gallipoli and in the war of independence, and the pasha stayed at his house on his visits to Tokat in the republican period.
On the tour of the country he made in the autumn of 1924, after the republic was declared, Mustafa Kemal came to Tokat on 25 September with his wife Latife Hanım and spent two nights in this house. When his host mentioned during that visit that a school was needed, Mustafa Kemal had the Gazipaşa primary school built in the same quarter; he laid its foundation in 1924 and it opened in 1928.
On his tour during the alphabet reform in 1928 he met civil servants and representatives of the people at the provincial government building in Tokat on 19 September and tested those in the hall on the new letters. He ate lunch at Mustafa Vasfi Bey's house and left the city afterwards. On his tour of 1930 he reached Tokat on 21 November and, after the welcome ceremony and lunch at the municipal building, went on to the house of Mustafa Bey, then deputy for Tokat.
After Mustafa Vasfi Bey died in 1934 the furnishings of the house were gathered into one room and kept there. The building was expropriated in 2001, assigned to the Ministry of Culture and Tourism in 2003, and restored and turned into a museum. Objects known to have been used by Atatürk himself were put back where they had stood, while the other parts of the house were furnished with what would have been found in a Tokat house at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. It opened on 26 June 2007.
The mansion has three floors and stands in a garden. In the number of its floors, its projecting upper rooms and the proportions of its windows and doors it follows the traditional houses of Tokat and of Anatolia generally. There are two ways in: one from the street at the front, and one from the street at the back through the garden. The plan is of the inner-hall type, with the rooms set on either side of a hall running north-east to north-west.
On the ground floor is a flagged space with a fountain in it, and from there one passes into the office room and a small entrance hall.
Visit status for this record: open to visitors.
