Levantine mansions of İzmir

Levantine mansions of İzmir (Turkish: İzmir Levanten köşkleri) refer to about thirty stately residences, dating principally from the 19th century and of which a significant number remain intact to this day, by being restored and continuing to be used and visited, in İzmir, Turkey. These residences differ from the traditional Ottoman mansions (konak) in the city by a number of features, as well as by their history. The families who owned them, the notable visitors they hosted in these houses, their testimonial destinies through the historic events of the city, make them an important part of İzmir's common heritage.

Levantine mansions are mostly situated in the modern-day metropolitan districts of Buca and Bornova, which are located slightly inland, and which were the favoured residential quarters for the city's richer classes of Western origins or, in the case of a few built more recently, in the coastal district of Karşıyaka.

Although the term "Levant" was used more frequently, as an imprecise geographical notion, in reference to the region considered to be starting from the easternmost shores of the Mediterranean Sea, roughly covering present-day Syria, the historic community generally known under the denomination of the "Levantines" gained prominence principally in Turkey, Egypt and Lebanon. The term became current in English language as of the 16th century, along with the first merchant adventurers in the region and the Levant Company. It was applied primarily, but not exclusively, to people of Venetian, Genoese, French, or other Mediterranean origin who lived in Turkey and its former provinces since the Ottoman period. During the 19th century and early 20th century, Germans, Austrians, Russians, as well as people who were originally issued from the Christian or Jewish Ottoman minorities or even Turks, also followed suit, as long as they could introduce themselves to the tightly knit community. And although they usually shunned the term, it could be applied to settlers of British or American background as well, in function of their adoption of the elusive Levantine culture and lifestyle or integration into the local economy and social life. Typical Levantines acted at the top of the hierarchy of class of intermediaries governing the relations of the Ottoman Empire with the outside world; coming before, generally richer than, and individually collaborating and socially in competition with the locals, all on the background of the decline of the Empire, in a regime characterized by the capitulations and other privileges, foreign debt and outside intervention into politics.

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