By Can Öztaş
Part II: Beyond the City
A city’s cultural field does not stop at its administrative boundary. If Ankara reveals itself in layers, some of its most telling ones begin once the city has thinned into road, valley and plateau.
The route begins at Gordion, about ninety kilometres southwest of the city. Gordion was the capital of ancient Phrygia, placed where routes between Lydia and Assyria crossed the Sakarya river. Its Great Tumulus rises above the plain and contains a wooden burial chamber whose funeral feast left behind the remains of spiced meat, lentils, beer, grapes and a honeyed drink. Even in death, Phrygia appears to have understood hospitality better than many modern conference organisers.
Gordion reminds us that Anatolia was never a single voice. It was a field of crossings, settlements, burials, myths and political experiments, some grand, some vanished, all more durable than most contemporary certainties.
ARMENIAN AND BYZANTINE IN NORTHWEST
Northwest of the city, the Zir Valley near Sincan district holds what remains of Stanoz (also known as Istanoz or Zir), once one of the wealthiest Armenian settlements in the province. According to Armenian manuscript tradition, its inhabitants had come from Cilicia centuries earlier. Residents produced the fine mohair fabric known as sof, processed from Angora goat wool and exported across Europe and the Ottoman world. The 17th-century Ottoman Traveller Evliya Çelebi visited in the 1640s and described a prosperous town of a thousand households, with a bazaar, a bathhouse and rocks shaped, in his words, like dragons, lions and elephants. Today, only a stone bridge, an old Armenian cemetery and scattered ruins remain.
Further north, in Kızılcahamam district, lies Seyhamamı (hot springs), whose thermal waters have long gathered local legend around them, including a story that they once healed Crusader soldiers. The village was once called simply Kilise, meaning church. The Byzantine church that gave it that name was demolished in the second half of the fifteenth century and a mosque was built on the same site. Hot springs, an old church name, a mosque and Byzantine and Ottoman layers sit together in one small settlement, as if history had declined to respect departmental boundaries.
Also in Kızılcahamam, the Alicin rock-cut site perches above a canyon at around a thousand metres. It is often called “Ankara’s Sümela” (Sümela, the famous monastery in Trabzon) and described as a monastery. Yet unlike most monasteries, it contains no frescoes and no clearly legible arrangement of cells, refectory or chapel. The mystery is genuine. It is best approached with wonder, but also with restraint. Not every ruin needs our confidence. Some deserve our questions.
The Holy Mother of God Monastery, known as Surp Asdvadzadzin and later remembered as Vank, Garmir or Kirmir (meaning red) depending on which traveller, record or tradition one follows, deserves its own moment. Devoted to the Virgin Mary and associated with the Çubuk river landscape in what is now Etlik district, it appears in traveller accounts as a major Armenian religious center. Today nothing remains of the structure itself, though paintings and engravings preserve its image. This is where certainty begins to fray and absence takes over.
Towards the northwest, Beypazarı town carries the traces of successive civilizations from the Hittites and Phrygians through to the Romans, Byzantines, Seljuks and Ottomans. Beypazarı preserves something rarer in Ankara province, a still-legible Ottoman townscape, with old inns, silver craft traditions and commercial streets.
Further west, Nallıhan district offers a landscape that is neither purely natural nor purely historical, but both at once. Nallıhan bird sanctuary, at the meeting of Aladağ Creek and the Sarıyar Dam, has recorded nearly two hundred bird species. The town itself claims a connection to Taptuk Emre, the Sufi master of Yunus Emre (a famous 13th century Turkish Sufi mystic and folk poet) and lies on the old Silk Road. Within the sanctuary, mineral-colored hills rise from the ancient lake bed with almost indecent theatricality. Its geology behaves extravagantly in a country that tends to undersell its own strangeness.
THE CITY THAT REFUSES TO SEDUCE
These are not merely weekend escapes for the exhausted urban classes, though heaven knows Ankara’s urban classes have earned their escapes. They are part of the city’s cultural field. How a society protects wetlands, reads valleys, marks old roads, explains geology, preserves cemeteries, restores mosques, records lost churches and guides visitors through complexity says far more about its civilization than a thousand speeches on soft power.
Ankara’s beauty lies in its refusal to seduce easily. It refuses to arrange itself into a single postcard. It refuses to let one period win. Phrygian tumuli, Roman traces, Byzantine fragments, Seljuk timber, Ahi memory, Ottoman markets, Armenian absences, Alevi-Bektashi sacred hills, republican boulevards, university districts and exhausted commuters of Ankara traffic all inhabit the same wider landscape. This is not a disorder. It is history behaving normally.
Ankara suggests a better form of cultural diplomacy, an invitation to attention and the courage to admit how many things have passed through us, lived beside us, prayed here, traded here, vanished here and left traces we still do not quite know how to honor.
Ankara is not grey. It is layered. And the layers go further than the brochure is willing to follow.
You can read the first part of this article at: https://turkeyindepth.com/article/936
