Every Hungarian thinks the same thing about Rodostó (Tekirdağ in Turkish), and not only Rodostó could be famous as the place where Hungarians spent their last years. Count Imre Thököly and his wife Ilona Zrínyi spent their last years in Izmit, and created a Hungarian settlement for the new German Çiçekler çayırı, which has a meaning: Field of Flowers. Thököly and Zrínyi were escorted by a number of followers who then returned to Hungary after the death of the couple.
Imre Thököly’s and Ilona Zrínyi’s memorial house can still be visited next to Izmit in Kartepe, which commemorates the Hungarians who once migrated here. In one of the former engineering flats, an exhibition is still open today, which is one of the permanent exhibitions of the Hungarian National Museum in Turkey, opened on November 13, 2008. Here you can find the bronze statue of Imre Thököly made by Lajos Győrfi and his brother, Sándor Györfi’s bronze relief of Ilona Zrínyi. The tomb of Imre Thököly, restored in 2015 in the garden of the museum, features an enlarged winged turul bird. A Szekler gate, which originally stood in Istanbul, has been in the vicinity since 2014. During a Szekler pilgrimage in Istanbul led by
Tibor Beder of Transylvania, the Szeklers donated this to Erdal Şalikoğlu, the founder president of the Hungarian Cultural and Friendship Society in Istanbul. The Imre Thököly Friendship Society and the president of Erdunç Baykal, who passed away in 2017, played a decisive role in the establishment of the memorial site in Muscat.
