On November 8, 1855, Adam Mickiewicz, Armand Levy, and Henryk Sluzalski rented a small house at the intersection of Yeni Sehir and Kalyoncu Kulluk streets from a lady named Rudnicka. The great fire that broke out in Istanbul in March 1870 destroyed almost all of Pera, including the house where Mickiewicz spent the last weeks of his life and where he died.
In the same year, Polish aristocrat Jozef Ratynski bought this land from the Istanbul Municipality. Ratynski built a replica of the demolished building on the land. Currently, the Adam Mickiewicz Museum is located on the corner of Tatli Badem Street and Serdar Omerpasa Street.
Mickiewicz's accommodation was a very simple and modest place. After the poet's death, a Polish visitor described the place as follows: "I saw its large hall with its square windows. An entree led into it. The floor was a table and a few simple chairs; in the corner was a bed covered with an even simpler straw mattress and a Turkish carpet. The room was empty and dark, even a little damp, and reminded me of a room in an inn, such as one might find on autumn journeys along the Ukrainian roads."
This accommodation was only a temporary stay for Mickiewicz before his planned trip to Bulgaria and Serbia, but it was here that he died on 26 November 1855. The house was converted into a museum in 1955, in cooperation with the Polish Ministry of Culture and Art, on the 100th anniversary of the poet's death.
The museum contains information and documents about Mickiewicz's life and works, photographs from the years the poet spent in Istanbul, manuscripts, historical documents, and photographs from the Polish freedom struggle. In the basement of the building, there is a symbolic tomb belonging to Mickiewicz.