Guide
The Sakarya Museum stands in the Adapazarı district of Sakarya, in a building that matters in the history of the war of independence, and it opened to visitors in 1993.
The house was built in 1915 for Major Baha Bey, head of the local recruiting office. In 1922, while the Turkish army was preparing for the great offensive, Mustafa Kemal travelled to İzmit and Adapazarı to inspect the Kocaeli group and stayed as a guest in this house; here he met his mother Zübeyde Hanım and his sister Makbule Hanım, who had come from İstanbul to see him.
The building was badly damaged in the Sakarya earthquake of 1967 and was registered in 1981 as an example of domestic architecture. The Ministry of Culture and Tourism expropriated it and renewed it, keeping the outside faithful to the original while changing the interior entirely.
The museum opened on 21 June 1993. The building was partly damaged in the Gölcük earthquake of 1999 and reopened on 28 June 2003 after restoration.
The house and garden together cover 1,290 square metres. Besides the display halls and offices there are a conference hall and an art gallery.
Both archaeological and ethnographic material is shown. From prehistory and from the Roman and Byzantine periods there are column bases, gravestones, inscribed stones, altars, a terracotta storage jar and an ossuary, along with axes, terracotta vessels, eye-drop and perfume bottles and objects of metal and glass. The Ottoman and Turkish ethnographic material includes weapons, copper implements, stamps and embroidery, together with some of the things Mustafa Kemal used while he stayed in the house.
