Mustafa Kemal moved his headquarters from Samsun to Havza six days after landing on the coast, and from 25 May to 13 June 1919 he lived and worked in this building, then the Mesudiye Hotel. The district governor of the day, Fahri Bey, rented the hotel — at the time the best lodging in Havza — for a month and gave it over to the Pasha and to the military and civil officers with him.
The building was a hotel before it was a headquarters. It is thought to have gone up in the first years of the 1900s, and Ottoman land records show that it was first run as a hotel 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. For a time it also served the fire brigade. It 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 floor and five on the second, wooden floors and ceilings and a hipped roof. The ground floor is now given over to handicrafts. On the first floor, two facing rooms, one to the north-west and one to the north-east, were prepared for the Pasha as a study and a bedroom; together with his sitting room and the Havza room they have been refurnished with objects of the period, and his room is shown as the Gazi Room. 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.
The top floor is organised by province rather than by object: rooms for Amasya, Sivas, Erzurum and Ankara, the places where the groundwork of the national struggle was laid, each showing through pictures and texts what was done there. Ethnographic and folkloric material is displayed in the halls of two of the floors, and the governor's office notes that what it calls the Atatürk mummy on display draws considerable interest from Turkish and foreign visitors alike.
Getting there
- Access
- In Havza, at the eightieth kilometre of the Samsun–Ankara road.
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).
