The Bandırma steamer at Samsun, the ship that carried Mustafa Kemal to the city in May 1919, is a museum built to her exact dimensions — not the original. It was built from the original drawings in 300 days, on a decision taken in 1999 by the then governor of Samsun and carried out by the metropolitan municipality and the provincial special administration, and since 2005 the municipality has held all rights to it and has run it as a museum.
The original had a long and undistinguished career before the three days that made her famous. She was launched at Glasgow in July 1878 from the Phoenix yard of Paisley, McIntyre & Co. as the iron-hulled screw steamer Trocadero, a general cargo and passenger ship registered in London. She passed through owners in London and Piraeus and carried cargo for years as the Kymi; on 12 December 1891 a navigational error put her on the rocks off Erdek and she was written off as a total loss, only to be bought, refloated and repaired in the Golden Horn within the same year. In 1894 she passed to the İdare-i Mahsusa, the Ottoman maritime administration of the day, and carried freight and passengers in Ottoman waters; when that body was renamed the Ottoman Maritime Administration on 28 October 1910 she became a mail steamer, under the name Bandırma. In the First World War she served as a transport, and in August 1915, sailing in convoy in the Sea of Marmara, she was missed by a torpedo from the English submarine HMS E-14. After the voyage to Samsun she went back to the mail service; she was withdrawn in 1924, sold to the shipbreaker İlhami Selçuk Söker in 1925 and broken up at the Golden Horn within four months.
Her registry details show how ordinary a vessel she was. She measured 328 gross and 192 net tons, 150.1 feet in length, 22.4 in beam and 11.4 in depth, was built on slip number 21, and was driven by a two-expansion steam engine of 60 horsepower made by Hutson & Corbett of Glasgow. Her first owner was the London firm of Dansey & Robinson. After she struck the rocks off Erdek a Captain Andreadis bought her and got her off the ground, another owner gave her the name Panderma, and in 1894 an Italian broker in İstanbul handled her sale to the Ottoman state line.
On the afternoon of Friday 16 May 1919 she left the Galata quay in İstanbul with Mustafa Kemal Paşa and his staff aboard, and reached the Tütün İskelesi at Samsun at eight on the morning of Monday 19 May. He spent the three-day passage in one cabin, and that cabin is the centre of the museum: a meeting is staged there with wax figures of Mustafa Kemal Paşa and four of his companions, around a walnut table and chairs of the early 1900s, with a Black Sea map of 1910 worked on gazelle hide laid out on the table. The brass clock opposite his figure is fixed at eight o'clock, for the hour he stepped ashore. A double-handset telephone of the late nineteenth century hangs on the wall, and map-measuring instruments and a fire extinguisher are part of the scene.
The rest follows green arrows on the deck. Amidships is the bridge, with figures of the captain İsmail Hakkı Bey, the mate Tahsin Bey of Üsküdar and the cipher clerk İsmail Bey, and the ship's compass, speed panel and other instruments. Forward is a cabin furnished as a bedroom, modelled on Atatürk's sleeping cabin aboard the yacht Savarona, holding walnut furniture of the period and an original wooden radio of the 1930s that he used. From opposite it, stairs go down into the hold, which is an exhibition space where guides -- a historian, an art historian and an archaeologist -- take visitors through the material.
The exhibition proper begins in the cabin at the stern, named the furnishing saloon, where the way up on to the ship arrives. It takes Mustafa Kemal's record as a student and his military ability first, then his later journeys to Samsun in pictures, and then the archive papers: his appointment as inspector of the Ninth Army troops, his activity in İstanbul and the Bandırma passage itself, set out through his written instructions of duty, his English visa and the documents naming the officers of his headquarters. The telegram reporting his arrival at Samsun is shown, together with papers on the journeys to Havza, Amasya and Erzurum. The directorate says the museum dwells particularly on Mustafa Kemal's regard for Samsun. The municipality's laying out of the grounds around the ship took ten months.
The ship sits inside a 35,000-square-metre park and open-air museum, the National Struggle Park. It holds what the directorate describes as Türkiye's longest ceramic reliefs, representing the Gallipoli battles and the drive of the enemy into the sea at İzmir; an inscription naming 1,200 men from Samsun and the surrounding districts killed in the War of Independence; bronze reliefs on the national struggle; a seven-figure monument of national liberation; and weapons used in the fighting — artillery, rifles, a torpedo, naval mines and anti-aircraft guns. There is an admission charge, with a reduced rate for students.
When to go
- Climate
- Across Samsun as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 7.2 °C in February to 23.7 °C in August; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in May, June, July, August, September and October; rainfall is heaviest in November (83 mm) and lightest in July (35 mm). Long-term means for 1929-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
Getting there
- Access
- On Bandırma beach in the Canik district, twenty-four kilometres from the airport and six from the coach station. Come by city dolmuş, or by horse carriage along the shore road.
