Guide
Mustafa Kemal moved his headquarters from Samsun to Havza six days after landing on the coast, and used the Mesudiye Hotel as it from 25 May to 13 June 1919. The district governor of the day, Fahri Bey, rented the hotel — then the best lodging in Havza — for a month and gave it over to the Pasha and to the military and civil officers with him.
Ottoman land records show that the building was first turned into a hotel and run by a man of Havza named Hurdazlı İsa Efendi, who kept it for a time before transferring it in 1917 to Ali Baba, who also held the lease on the Maarif bath. The building was made a museum in 1994 and restored to its original form in 2001, when it was registered as a private museum under its present name.
It is a masonry building on the street, two storeys above a ground floor, with four rooms on the first and five on the second, wooden floors and ceilings and a hipped roof. Two facing rooms on the first floor, one to the north-west and one to the north-east, were prepared for the Pasha as a study and a bedroom. Some of his officers were put in the rooms upstairs and the rest were lodged in the houses of leading families in the town.
The study is the room that matters. He received the delegations that came to see him here through those three weeks, and the telegraph key displayed in it is the instrument over which he sent the Havza circulars and his other correspondence to colleagues, army commanders and governors.
