Atatürk's Birthplace

The pink house in Thessaloniki where the founder of modern Turkey was born

Atatürk's Birthplace is a pink Ottoman house in the Turkish consulate grounds near the waterfront, open to visitors as a small museum. Turkey maintains the property under a long-standing arrangement, and entry is free. The house has been furnished to suggest early-20th-century bourgeois Ottoman life, with period furniture, photographs, and personal effects. It is modest in scale but the story it embodies is enormous.

The visit works best if you know something about Atatürk before you arrive. The great irony of the place — the founder of modern Turkey's secular nationalism born in a cosmopolitan, multiethnic Ottoman city that would become purely Greek within a generation — is one of the key threads running through the 20th century history of this whole region.

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A story
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was born here in 1881, in a city that was then part of the Ottoman Empire. It was a Greek city, a Turkish city, a Jewish city and a Bulgarian city more or less simultaneously — exactly the kind of layered, contested place that shaped the radical nationalist who would later abolish the caliphate, ban the fez, replace Arabic script with Roman letters, and turn a 600-year empire into a secular republic. He never publicly spoke of missing Thessaloniki, but he asked that a view of the city be painted on the ceiling of his bedroom in Ankara.