Tekirdag

With a hilly setting at the head of a gently curving bay, TEKIRDAĞ – the ancient and medieval Rodosto – is a fairly pleasant town, with a few remaining, dilapidated wooden houses, a clutch of museums and a ferry service across the Sea of Marmara.

The town’s best-known attraction – certainly for numbers of visiting Hungarians – is the Rákóczi Museum (Rakoczi Müzesi), easily found by going west along the seafront boulevard from the eski iskele (old jetty) and then uphill inland. Transylvanian Prince Ferenc Rákóczi (1676–1735) was leader of an unsuccessful 1703–11 revolt against the Austrian Habsburgs; in 1719, Sultan Ahmet III granted him asylum – or rather, internal exile – here, away from the political hotbed of the capital. Rákóczi spent the last fifteen years of his life in this seventeenth-century house, now the property of the Hungarian government. Declared a museum in 1932, it was meticulously restored in 1981–82: the interior, especially the elegant top-floor dining/reception room with its lattice ceiling, stained glass and painted cabinets, far outshines the rather thin exhibits comprising paraphernalia of Rákóczi’s insurgent army.

The only other points of mild interest are the Tekirdağ Müzesi at Barbaros Cad 1, a short walk east from the Rákóczi Museum, with archeological finds from the province, and, further downhill, the Namik Kemal Evi (Namik Kemal House), a two-storey wooden house museum honouring the province’s most famous journalist and Young Ottoman (1840–88), though again the building outshines the contents.