Hüseyin Rahmi Gürpınar's mansion in Heybeliada transferred to IMM

The General Directorate of Foundations has lost the lawsuit regarding the historic mansion of Hüseyin Rahmi Gürpınar, which belongs to the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality.

The ownership of the mansion, which has been passed between public institutions since Gürpınar passed away in 1944, had transferred to IMM in 2014; however, the General Directorate of Foundations took the mansion from IMM on March 17, 2022, and registered it in the name of the Şehzade Sultan-Mehmet Foundation.

The belongings inside the house, where Hüseyin Rahmi Gürpınar spent most of his life and wrote his works—and for which writers and NGOs in the Adalar district have held protests from time to time demanding its return—had been left to decay for years.

TENS OF THOUSANDS OF SIGNATURES COLLECTED

While more than 19 thousand signatures were collected in a petition campaign titled “Let the Heybeliada Hüseyin Rahmi Gürpınar House be Opened as a Museum,” initiated by Nihan Aydar, a Turkish teacher living in Heybeliada, the IMM had also filed a new lawsuit for the registration of the historic mansion in the name of the IMM.

The Adalar Civil Court of First Instance ruled on January 10, 2024, that the historic mansion be registered in the land registry in the name of the IMM and returned to the IMM.