Part I: The City
Ankara is often described by those who do not know it well as a grey city. This is unfair, though not entirely mysterious. A city that must constantly perform seriousness is rarely forgiven for having charm.
Yet Ankara’s charm is real. It is private, reveals itself slowly, and almost always just outside the official frame. It is a city of dry light, hard hills, old stones, republican geometry, Ottoman shadows, Roman fragments, Seljuk craft and streets that remember more than they are prepared to explain.
This is why Ankara deserves a cultural diplomacy route, a way of showing visitors not only what the city proudly displays, but also what it half-remembers, neglects, misnames, hides or leaves to survive behind other buildings.
WHAT TO FIND
Begin with the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations. Its collection includes Hittite reliefs, Urartian bronzes, Chalcolithic figurines and objects from Gordion. It is one of the few places where a visitor can walk, room by room, through millennia of Anatolian time.
From there, in the old city, Aslanhane Mosque, also known as Ahi Şerefettin Mosque, stands in the Samanpazarı neighbourhood close to the castle. Built around 1290 by leaders of the Ahi Brotherhood, the influential socio-religious guild of craftsmen and merchants, it is one of Ankara’s quiet marvels. Its wooden columns, muqarnas capitals and kündekâri (interlocking geometric woodwork) minbar belong to a world in which craft was part of the moral life of a building.
Nearby stands the Temple of Augustus, believed to have been built on or near an earlier sacred site, possibly linked to Phrygian religious traditions. It was later converted into a Byzantine church, before the Ottoman Hacı Bayram Mosque was built against it. Three faiths and four building phases exist in one small square. The Column of Julian stands nearby, erected to mark the visit of Rome’s last pagan emperor as he passed through Ancyra in 362 on his way to war with Persia.
The seventeenth-century Ottoman traveller Dervish Mehmed Zillî, known as Evliya Çelebi, knew this city differently. In the 17th century, he visited Hacı Bayram Mosque, described the castle, took in the commercial life of the old city and, in one of those episodes that makes Evliya both invaluable and impossible, was reproached in a dream for neglecting Er Dede Sultan Shrine. Even a great traveller needs reminding where to look.
Yet Ankara’s most decisive modern layer is republican. A short walk through Ulus leads to the First Grand National Assembly building, now the War of Independence Museum, and the Second Parliament building, now the Republic Museum. These are not simply museum buildings. They give physical form to a revolutionary capital, modest, severe, improvised and determined. Nearby, Ankara Palas, opened in 1928, tells the diplomatic side of the same story. It was where the young Republic received foreign delegations and staged its new presence before the world. Above all stands Anıtkabir, Atatürk’s mausoleum, the central ceremonial landscape through which modern Ankara still understands itself.
THE OLD CITY
The old Ankara around Ulus, Kale (Ankara Castle) and Hacı Bayram Mosque, the descent down Çıkrıkçılar and the market area and Tahtakale is not simply a historic district. It is a palimpsest with poor signage. Ottoman commercial streets sit above or beside Byzantine fragments. Islamic sacred geographies overlap with older Christian memories. Republican Ankara rises nearby with its clean lines and pedagogical confidence, while older Ankara continues to mutter under its breath.
The remains of St Clement’s Church are perhaps the perfect example. Hidden behind buildings around Denizciler Caddesi (Denizciler Avenue), what survives is not a satisfying monument but a reproach in stone, a fragment, a wall, a marble block marked by a cross. Not quite a destination, more an indictment with masonry attached. It is difficult to visit, difficult to explain and therefore exactly the sort of place a serious cultural guide should mention. Cities are not only made of monuments that survived successfully. They are also made of things that survived badly, privately, awkwardly, or almost not at all.
The same is true of the Armenian, Greek and Jewish sacred geography of Ankara. Seventeenth-century court records preserve the names of churches such as Kirmir, Meryem Ana (Virgin Mary), Aya Nikola (St. Nicholas), Kırklar (Church of the Forty Martyrs), Yanartaş and Serkis (St. Sarkis), alongside a synagogue. Some are largely lost now, belonging as much to absence as to itinerary.
A mature cultural diplomacy would not panic in front of that absence. It would say: “something was here; we know some of its names; we do not know everything; we lost much; we are still responsible for how we speak of it”.
Every age sees selectively. The question is whether we can learn to see more generously than the guide before us.
And Ankara’s layers do not stop at the edge of the city.
TO BE CONTINUED NEXT WEEK…
