Guide
The house stands on Atatürk Caddesi at the focal point of Mersin, and it is a museum because of eleven days. Atatürk and his wife Latife Hanım stayed here as guests during their visit to the city between 20 January and 2 February 1925.
It was built in 1897 as a private house for the German consul of the day, Mr Christman, on the occasion of his marriage to the daughter of a Mersin merchant named Mavromati; the architect is not known, and locally it is still called the Krisman mansion. It passed for a time to the Tahinci family, was bought in 1972 by Nebil Hayfavi and served until 1976 as the Toros College. Left empty after that, it was given the name Atatürk House by a municipal decision the same year, expropriated in 1980, transferred to the Ministry of Culture in 1982, and formally opened as the Atatürk House and Museum on 12 October 1992. It is two storeys, faced outside in dressed stone, and counts among the better examples of civil architecture in the city; traces of a bath known to have stood in the garden have now disappeared.
The ground floor is arranged as Atatürk in Photographs and Documents. It holds photographs taken during his visits to Mersin and twenty-two personal effects brought from the Anıtkabir museum, among them a bathrobe, a shirt, and a fork, knife and spoon. Some pieces were given by the Akcora family of Tarsus and by Taki Aleksioglu; the cup he drank his coffee from was presented by Erdal Akalın.
The upper floor is ethnographic: a large central hall with seven rooms opening off it, two arranged as bedrooms, one as a study and four as sitting rooms. At the entrance there is a Kuvayimilliye corner with further photographs.
