39.93° N · 32.86° E — Başkent, Türkiye · 938 m
Something is coming
to the steppe.
Ankara.com is being built in Türkiye's capital — a city of stone, wind and quiet conviction. We are not ready to say what it is. First, you should meet the city.
Bölüm I — Bozkır · The High Plain
A city built on
light and wind.
Ankara stands at nine hundred and thirty-eight metres, alone on the Anatolian steppe, and the sky here behaves accordingly — huge, dry, unbothered by clouds. This is bozkır country: barely four hundred millimetres of rain a year, summers that bleach the hills to straw, winters that seal them under snow. The wind never really stops. It comes off the plain with no mountain to break it, and Ankaralılar swear it shapes the character — açık sözlü, straight-talking, no ornament.
Bozkır sadelik ister. — The steppe asks for plainness.
Bölüm II — Anıtkabir · The Republic
The ridge that watches
over everything.
On the 13th of October, 1923, the Grand National Assembly chose a dusty market town of perhaps thirty thousand people over Istanbul itself — Ankara, a railway junction on the steppe, close to the front and far from the old empire's ghosts. Twelve days later the Republic was proclaimed. Atatürk rests where the city can always see him: on Rasattepe, the hill of observations, renamed Anıttepe. His mausoleum — Anıtkabir, completed in 1953 to the designs of Emin Onat and Orhan Arda — is a colonnaded hall of travertine and bronze, reached by a two-hundred-and-sixty-two-metre road lined with twenty-four seated lions, one for each of the Oghuz tribes. The honour guard changes every hour. Nobody in Ankara ever forgets which ridge is which.
Bölüm III — Ankara Kalesi · The Old Town
Three thousand years
on one rock.
Below the citadel's double walls — İç Kale and Dış Kale, Roman, Byzantine, Seljuk and Ottoman stone stacked like a ledger — the old town still works the way it always has. Coppersmiths hammer in Samanpazarı; the timber houses of Hamamönü lean together over the lanes; inside the castle stands the Alaaddin Mosque, dated 1178, the city's oldest. And at the rock's foot waits a quiet astonishment: the Temple of Augustus, where the emperor's own account of his deeds — the Res Gestae — survives more completely than anywhere on earth, carved in Latin and Greek on the cella walls. Ankara was Ancyra long before it was Ankara, and the anchor of that name is still down here.
Bölüm IV — Çankaya · Kızılay · The New City
Avenues that argue
with the horizon.
The modern city climbed south from the old town, avenue by avenue. Kızılay is its beating square — Güvenpark, where the 1935 Security Monument carries Atatürk's charge in bronze: Türk, öğün, çalış, güven. Be proud, work hard, trust. Up the hill runs Tunalı Hilmi, bookshops and shopfronts ending in Kuğulu Park, where swans hold court under the plane trees. And above everything, on the Çankaya ridge, Atakule — the needle and the disc, a hundred and twenty-five metres of it, revolving slowly over the rooftops since 1989. On clear days the whole city spreads below it like a map of itself.
“Ankara'nın en güzel yanı İstanbul'a dönüşüdür.”
The best thing about Ankara, the joke goes, is the road back to Istanbul.
Ask anyone who stayed.
Bölüm V — Memur Şehri · The Character
Unshowy by day,
tender by night.
Turks call Ankara memur şehri — the city of civil servants — and grin about it: gri şehir, the grey city, the punchline of the joke above. The joke misses. This is a city of students as much as ministries — ODTÜ, Hacettepe, Ankara, Bilkent, Gazi — hundreds of thousands of young people arguing in its çay bahçeleri until past midnight. Of simit sellers on every corner, the Ankara simidi darker and crunchier than anywhere else, torn and shared on park benches. Of football terraces, second-hand bookshops, long walks home under the plane trees. Ankara does not perform. It keeps its word.
Bölüm VI — Gece · Nightfall
The lights come on.
The city exhales.
Dusk is when Ankara forgives itself. The steppe gold drains to rose, then to the deep blue the Turks call lacivert; windows ignite along the Çankaya slopes one by one, like a sentence being written. Somewhere below, a simit cart is folding up. Somewhere above, the guard on the ridge stands his hour. Whatever is being built in this city is being built in this light — patiently, without announcement, the way Ankara does everything.
Geri sayım · Counting to the next dawn over the steppe
39.93° N · 32.86° E — whatever it is, it arrives with the light.
Ankara'dan, yakında.
From Ankara, soon.