Arkas Sanat Bornova (Mattheys Köşkü)

Arkas Sanat Bornova is an art and exhibition centre opened in Mattheys Mansion, one of the oldest Levantine houses in Bornova. The mansion is also known as Mates Mansion, the Steinbuchel House and the Wood-Paterson House. It is thought to have been built in 1780, though some sources give 1860. According to the architect who carried out its restoration, the later date may have arisen because the mansion, which grew with additions over different periods, went through a major change in the mid-1800s. In its first form it was a simple building on a square plan. The story of the mansion reflects the intertwined past of Bornova's Levantine families. John Maltas bought the building from the Paterson family and rebuilt it as a summer house, and in 1840 it passed by inheritance to his daughter Eugenie Wood. Eugenie was married to Charles Wood, chief physician of the English Hospital in İzmir, and had seven children. One of her daughters, the painter, poet and composer Hortense Wood, lived in the mansion until her death in 1924. Hortense Wood is said to have taken piano lessons from Franz Liszt, and Liszt is said to have played the piano in the part of the house called the Cairo Room. Hortense received many well-known guests at her home and photographed them. The most remembered day in the mansion's history is 16 September 1922. On that day Mustafa Kemal Pasha visited the mansion with the commanders accompanying him and the writer Halide Edip, and met the seventy-eight-year-old Hortense Wood. During this visit he is said to have played chess with Hortense's nephew Fernand de Cramer. Later the mansion passed to Renee Steinbüchel and Sonia Whittall, and it took its present name from their father, Tony Mattheys. Thanks to its garden wall built of river stones and its arched entrance gate, the mansion became one of the few Levantine houses to survive into the 2000s. The mansion was bought by the Arkas group in 2018 and opened to visitors in 2023 after a restoration lasting five years. A nine-hole mini golf course was laid out in the garden in memory of the Bornova Golf Club, which closed in 1970. Each hole features a model of a Bornova mansion made by the ceramic artist Verda Sipahi, together with a symbol describing that mansion. These small models are an interesting way to see, in a single garden, mansions that no longer stand or have taken on other uses. Inside the mansion a selection from the Arkas Carpet Collection is on display. Brought together over more than thirty years, the collection covers Anatolian carpets of the classical period, tribal carpets, Ottoman palace carpets and European tapestries. In Bornova you see mainly carpets woven in Western and Central Anatolia between the 16th and 19th centuries. The visiting area includes ten exhibition rooms, a room showing a carpet loom and spinning tools, a section explaining carpet designs on panels and a screening room where a short documentary on Anatolian carpets is shown. The plaster cornices and high ceilings of the restored rooms form the backdrop for the carpets. At the entrance on Gençlik Caddesi, traditional stone benches on both sides, the pesulaki typical of Bornova's mansions, greet you. In spring wisteria covers the arched gate, and those weeks are the most beautiful time to photograph the mansion. According to its official website, the centre is closed on Mondays and free for all visitors on Tuesdays; check current hours and ticket information on the same site. It is also closed on the first day of Ramadan Bayram and the first two days of Kurban Bayram. The centre can be reached by ESHOT buses passing the Rektörlük stop, and it is also a walk from the Bornova station on the M1 line of the İzmir Metro. La Fontaine Mansion on the Ege University campus and the ethnography museum in the Sirkehane are a few minutes' walk away. Paterson Mansion on Mustafa Kemal Caddesi can be seen on the same walk. Separate from Arkas Sanat Alsancak in Konak, the Bornova centre lets you see the art of the carpet in the rooms of a historic house.