Guide
The house was built in timber for Münif Tahir Paşa of Antep, Abdülhamid II's minister of education, by the Italian architect and sculptor Rozette. After the Ottoman state fell it stood more or less empty until 1929.
It collected two nicknames on the way. A giant giraffe sculpture by the same architect stood in the garden, so people called it the Giraffe Villa; when the sculpture aged and the wind began to draw an unsettling hum from it, the neighbours started calling it the Haunted Villa instead.
Kâzım Karabekir Paşa bought it on 15 November 1930 and moved his family in. The foundation's account of that first period is plain: they had a divan, some kilims, a Turkish flag on the wall and family photographs. Quilts and blankets were nailed over the windows of the other rooms because there was no glass in them, and no money to have glass fitted.
The family lived there without a break until 1938, when Karabekir was elected deputy for İstanbul and then speaker of the assembly and they moved to Ankara; after that the house served as a summer place. He had already turned part of it into a museum in his own lifetime, showing the things he had kept since childhood — his own and his family's — and the foundation's museum grew out of that. The family returned to İstanbul after his death in 1948.
