Adam Mickiewicz Museum

Adam Mickiewicz was born in 1798 and is remembered as a poet, playwright and patriot, author of Poland's national epic and the greatest figure of Polish Romanticism. Historians often compare him with Byron and Goethe. In September 1855 he set out for the Ottoman Empire to organise a Polish regiment to fight Russia in the Crimean War, and he died in Istanbul on 26 November 1855.

In the last weeks of his life he and two friends rented a small house at the corner of two Pera streets. The great fire of March 1870 wiped out almost all of Pera, including that house. The same year a Polish nobleman, Józef Ratyński, bought the plot from the municipality and built an exact reconstruction of the original. The building stands today at the corner of Tatlı Badem Sokak and Serdar-ı Ömer Paşa Caddesi.

It became a museum in 1955, the centenary of the poet's death, in cooperation with Poland's ministry of culture. The rooms hold documents and information about his life and works, photographs of his Istanbul years, and objects, papers and pictures from the Polish struggle for independence. In the basement there is a symbolic tomb, since Mickiewicz himself is buried in Kraków.