What did you do to people Mickiewicz - one would like to ask, paraphrasing Norwid - that you had to die in such a place? And the tourist, before he reaches Sweet Almond Street, where Adam Mickiewicz spent his last moments, will get lost among the backstreets, shabby tenement houses and drying laundry. However, the helpful strangers will be happy to point out, even if only by sign, where we are going.

Adam Mickiewicz Museum in Istanbul
. Mickiewicz began his Pilgrim with the words "At my feet, a land of plenty and splendour, / Above my head a bright sky, next to me a beautiful lickety-split; / Why does the heart flee from here to the countryside / Far away and - alas! even further away?". These lines describe the emotions that a tourist can also experience when standing in front of a small, cornered, asymmetrical brick building with a cream-coloured facade. Formerly free-standing, it now adjoins a much taller outbuilding. Its body has a tripartite division. The outer sections are two window openings wide, while the central section is more extensive and has three windows. The grilling of all the openings is notable, but archive photographs from the 1950s show that this was already a permanent feature of the building. The height of the individual wings also varies. The left wing is single-storey, with a decorative bay window ending in a small balcony with a wrought-iron balustrade. The middle and right sections are two-storey, with the extreme section also having a bay window.

The individual storeys are separated from each other by cornices with decorative friezes, provided with small brackets. Inside the building there are symmetrically arranged rooms, three in total, separated by a corridor and a staircase that was so narrow that it could hardly fit the coffin with Adam Mickiewicz's body in it.

Mickiewicz in Turkey - the bard's last journey
When, a year before the outbreak of the November Uprising, Mickiewicz set off on a journey across Europe, he could not even have anticipated that it would be difficult for him to return to his homeland. And what was initially supposed to be an adventure - he visited Italy, Germany and Switzerland - turned out to be a wandering to the end of his days. In 1832, he began to establish a family and professional life in Paris, and also visited Lausanne and Rome. In 1855, during the Crimean War, he went to Turkey to agitate for the Polish Legions.

Together with his personal secretary Armand Lévy and his friend Henryk Służalski, he rented accommodation in Istanbul from an unknown "Polish woman married to a German tailor", or - as others would have it - "at the house of a poor Pole named Rudnicki, who wanted to invent a perpetual motion machine". The place was located outside the city centre, in a poor district of Pery (today's Beyoğlu).

The Polish encyclopaedist Zenon Fisz described it as "a sad, lonely and deserted house on Kalendzi-Kuluk Street [...]. The furnishings consisted of a table, a few straight chairs and a bed, which was even simpler, covered with a mattress and Turkish carpet, standing in a corner. The room reeked of wilderness, it was dark and even damp".

From other accounts, we know that the medical care provided to the Bard in his last days was as despicable as the conditions in which he died. But to this day we have not been able to establish unequivocally what happened on 26 November 1855. Was it cholera, as the visiting doctor ruled, or perhaps poisoning, as Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński, among others, suggested? After initial disputes over the funeral, the final decision was made by Prince Adam Czartoryski. Mickiewicz was first buried in Paris, and on 4 July 1890 the bard's corpse was laid to rest in Wawel Cathedral.

"Just the ground "
It is known that the original building in which Mickiewicz spent his last days was destroyed in the great fire of Istanbul in 1870. It took many years for the Turkish authorities to identify the owners of the land, which the Polish industrialist and originator of the memorial chamber, Henryk Groppler, was waiting for. He was overtaken by a colleague, Jozef Ratynsky, and acquired the historic square for next to nothing. As we read in the 1901 St Petersburg magazine Kraj, it was he who commissioned the reconstruction there "strictly according to plan of the old burnt building [...]". Ratyński's son then erected a plaque with the inscription: "Napamiatke erected tendom / On the spot where Adam Mickiewicz died on 26 November 1855". Over time, three more plaques were added. One, not preserved, was funded by the Turkish Unity and Progress Committee; the other, in 1933. - Istanbul's Polish community.

The museum we know today was not established until 1955, the centenary of Mickiewicz's death. At that time, a fourth plaque was erected, and a commemorative crypt was created in the former cellar where the bard's body had rested for a month. No material mementos have survived, and the building itself changed hands until 1980, when it became part of the Museum of Turkish and Muslim Art in Istanbul.

Renovation of Mickiewicz's symbolic tomb in Ist anbul
The Adam Mickiewicz Museum of Literature in Warsaw requested that the Polonika Institute carry out conservation work on the poet's symbolic tomb in Istanbul. The matter concerned the very heart of the building. The crypt was in a poor state of repair and the tombstone was shattered. The action was part of the Polonica Institute's strategic programme - Protecting Polish Cultural Heritage Abroad - and in 2018 specialists associated with the Institute came to the Bosphorus. They glued the slab together, and filled the cavities with suitable grout and glued over the edges. In addition, they also reinforced the slab with a fibreglass mat, which protected it from slipping and will make it easier to dismantle in the future. In addition, they cleaned the joints on the stone facing of the crypt walls, thus achieving a unifying effect. The memorial plaques embedded in the outer walls also required conservation intervention. The inscriptions were cleaned and the plaques protected, so that visitors felt at the threshold of the crypt that they were entering a place important to every Pole.

The Collection of the A. Mickiewicz Museum in Istanbul
Today, the Adam Mickiewicz Museum of Literature in Warsaw is formally responsible for the collections and exhibitions at the museum in Istanbul, with the support of the Polish Consulate General in Istanbul. Permanent exhibition elements, the foundations of which were laid back in the 1880s, include busts of the poet - one cast in bronze by Ewarysta Zbąski around 1898, the other from 1835 made by Dawid d'Angers. Reproductions of paintings are on display, including Portrait of Adam Mickiewicz on a Judah Rock by Walenty Wańkowicz, lithographs or sculptures. A 19th-century traveller's trunk also captures the imagination. Some of the walls are lined with tapestries in an oriental, red-and-white pattern.

The current exhibition is arranged in chronological order, with the artist's life divided into four stages and each presented on a separate floor. In keeping with this idea, the tour begins at the very top, where there are artefacts from the poet's youth (1798-1824). On the floor below, to the left, there is an exhibition on Mickiewicz's stay in a military camp in Burgas (Bulgaria) in October 1855. In the rooms to the right, there is an exhibition on the poet's mission to the East in November 1855. The walls of the staircase, meanwhile, feature photoplastics with genre scenes from the life of ancient Turkey. On the ground floor, directly across from the entrance, are plaques with a biography of the writer, as well as a wall with blocks printed with Mickiewicz's poetry in translation into several languages. This original artefact is intended to resemble the once-popular tear-off calendars, and each visitor can take a fragment of the collection with them, most legitimately.

On level four, there is a crypt where a symbolic tombstone of Mickiewicz has been arranged. Emerging from the semi-darkness is a marble catafalque with whitewashed letters carved into a stone slab and a white stone cross over which an icon of Our Lady of the Dawn Gate hangs. A copy of the poet's death mask is also on display in the crypt.

On the subject of taking pride of place on Istanbul's cobblestones....
Is it worth visiting the Adam Mickiewicz Müzesi in Istanbul? If we treat this place in the manner due to the bard, who knows, we might experience an almost metaphysical journey in the footsteps of the last days of the greatest of Polish poets. Thanks to the fact that the museum is not crowded with tourists, everyone will be able to indulge in reflection at their own individual pace. Let's also tear up a poetry card of your choice and let yourself be guided by a lyrical phrase on the Istanbul cobblestones, if only for a moment.