Paterson Köşkü

Paterson Mansion stands on Mustafa Kemal Caddesi, one of Bornova's main avenues, and is considered the largest of İzmir's Levantine mansions. Construction began in 1859 under John Paterson, a Scottish merchant known for the grain trade. Some sources describe him as a merchant who came to İzmir from Leith in Scotland and who dealt in chrome mining and the export of farm produce. Bornova was then a summer village for Levantine families; when the İzmir-Kasaba railway reached the district in 1866, it became a permanent home for them. Paterson Mansion is the most ambitious example of the period in which large mansions with spacious gardens rose north of the railway. The building has two floors and thirty-eight rooms. With roughly two thousand square metres of floor area, it is counted among the largest civil buildings in İzmir. Much of the building material was brought from continental Europe and England, and the fireplaces and furniture of the rooms are also said to have come from England. The front facade was altered seven times while the family lived here, so the facade you see today is the product of accumulated additions rather than of a single period. When it was built, the mansion stood in a garden of one hundred and thirty-three decares surrounded by high walls. The estate held racehorses, animal farms, greenhouses and farmland, and the house is said to have had around sixty servants. Today the land around the mansion covers twenty-five thousand four hundred square metres. The Paterson family used the building as a home for a long time and emigrated to England in 1963. The mansion then served as an office for NATO personnel for about five years. In 1973 parts of it were demolished when it was turned into a carpet factory, and in 1978 an expropriation decision was taken. A fire in 1986 badly damaged the main entrance section and completely destroyed the west wing. The ministry began a restoration in the early 1990s, but that work was left unfinished. During the same period a landscaping project was carried out around the mansion with the approval of the conservation board. İzmir Metropolitan Municipality prepared the survey, restitution and restoration projects for the mansion at the end of 2010. After a protocol signed with the Ministry of Culture and Tourism in February 2016, restoration began in June of that year. According to Wikipedia, the ministry leased the right to use the mansion to the municipality for forty-nine years in 2017. During the works most of the later, non-original additions were removed, and the restoration of the three-storey tower building was largely completed; the bath inside the tower building was also renewed. Research excavations in the garden revealed three outbuildings, two ornamental pools with fountains and a cistern. Because the garden lies within a natural protected area, the landscaping project needed approval from both the conservation board and the relevant ministry. The restoration has stretched over many years, and the interiors of the mansion are not yet open for regular visits. Today the way to see the mansion is to approach the garden boundary from Mustafa Kemal Caddesi. Between the site panels and the trees you can still grasp the scale of the tower building and the main block. In front of the facade, the fountain pool seen in old photographs shows how the mansion was designed together with its garden. Morning light is better for photographs, because the trees on the street side cast shade on the facade in the afternoon. Since access depends on the progress of the restoration, check the announcements of İzmir Metropolitan Municipality for current information. The easiest way to get here is the İzmir Metro; the Bornova and Ege Üniversitesi stations of the M1 line are close to the district centre and the campus. ESHOT buses also run along Mustafa Kemal Caddesi. Within walking distance are Arkas Sanat Bornova in Mattheys Mansion, La Fontaine Mansion on the Ege University campus and the ethnography museum in the Sirkehane. A few hundred metres to the northwest the Aşık Veysel Recreation Area begins, so it is easy to end a mansion walk with a stroll in the park. Paterson Mansion is a good starting point for understanding Bornova's mansion heritage as a whole, because it shows the scale of Levantine life in the district more clearly than any other building.