Trotsky’s Istanbul house for sale

ISTANBUL

Photo of the house: Bertil Videt - Wikipedia - CC BY 2.5

The former house of Marxist revolutionary, theorist, Soviet politician and Red Army founder Leon Trotsky on Istanbul’s Büyükada Island is up for sale on a real estate website.  

The Hanifi family, who has put up the ruined house with its land for $4.4 million, has asked the buyer to preserve the Trotsky name and wanted the Culture and Tourism Ministry to buy the house to turn it into a museum. 

Tourists have been upset by the poor condition of the house, saying other home of Trotsky’s while he was in exile had been preserved and turned into a museum by the state. 

The three-story house and its garden are situated on a 3,550-square-meter piece of land on Büyükada. The property’s natural lobster pool, which Trotsky had built on the coast, still exists. 

Trotsky was deported from the Soviet Union in February 1929. His first station in exile was Büyükada, where he stayed for the next four years. He lived in the house with his second wife Natalia, grandchild Sieva and three male guards. 

He died in 1940 from injuries received when he was attacked in his home in Mexico City.