Lying at the Sea of Marmara, Kocaeli (called Nicodemia at that time) was the town where Count Imre Thokoly (1657-1705), former prince of Transylvania, was exiled in 1701 and died four years later.
Under an agreement signed with the municipal council in 2006, the National Museum of Hungary has contributed an entire collection of relics to the house, including replicas of one-time arms, coins and documents, as well as maps, paintings and texts in Hungarian and Turkish on the exhibits.
There are already two memorial sites for great Hungarian statesmen in Turkey. One is the house of Prince Ferenc Rakoczi II (1676-1735) in Tekirdag, where he lived until his death. The other one is the house of reform leader Lajos Kossuth (1802-1894) in the town of Kutahya, where he lived in exile in 1850-51 after the defeat of Hungary's 1848-49 anti-Habsburg freedom fight.
