The Ergene Köşkü is the guest house of a sugar factory, and the factory is the reason it matters. Alpullu, in the Babaeski district beside the railway station, was, according to Kırklareli's provincial inventory, the first plant in Türkiye to produce sugar: founded on a capital of five hundred thousand lira by the joint-stock company İstanbul ve Trakya Şeker Fabrikaları, built by the German firm Maschinenfabrik Buckau R. Wolf, begun on 22 December 1925 and in operation by 26 November 1926.
The köşk itself is a modest masonry building of a basement and a ground floor within the factory grounds. Atatürk came to see the works in 1930 and stayed here, and statesmen who visited in later years were lodged in it too.
The provincial inventory registers it as a monument and records it as still in the use it was built for, a guest house, owned by Türkiye Şeker Fabrikaları A.Ş.
When to go
- Climate
- Across Kırklareli as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 3 °C in January to 23.9 °C in July; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in May, June, July, August and September; rainfall is heaviest in December (70 mm) and lightest in August (21 mm). Long-term means for 1959-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
