Turkey’s capital has many surprises in store for those who believe it is just one more carefully planned city without a soul. It’s rich in heritage and civilization
like most national capitals, Ankara has a major disadvantage. Rightly or wrongly, it tends to get labelled as bureaucratic and, by definition, boring and soulless. Besides, the fact that much of it is planned and, hence, displays a certain predictability and uniformity in appearance, facilitates the tagging. Ankara also suffers by comparison with Istanbul with its ubiquitous presence of history and its fabled architectural legacies.
Most labels, however, are arbitrarily applied, and it is no different in Ankara's case. A very different view of Turkey's capital emerges as one looks around. First, not the whole of Ankara is planned; the German city planner, Hermann Jansen, left the old city around the part called Ulus, out of his drawing board and began his exercise southward from there. In spite of many concessions to tourism, the enchanting streets of Ulus retain a unique character with their eating places, shops and roadside stalls selling antiques and handicrafts, and provoking a reverse flow of the imagination to encompass life millennia ago.
Ankara, like the rest of Turkey, has a long history dating back to the Palaeolithic period, the relics of which are carefully and systematically preserved in the Museum of Anatolian Civilization. One of the best of its kind in the world, it also houses the relics of the Mesolithic, Neolithic, Chalcolithic and Bronze ages and then again of the Hittite, Phrygian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Seljuk and Ottoman periods collected mainly from Ankara and the adjoining areas.
While the museum presents the past in a microcosm through jewellery, artefacts, statues, gold, silver, bronze and marble objects as well as weapon and implements, with comprehensive labelling and commentaries, several striking ruins tempt the imagination to recall how the past was when it was the present. One of these is the Roman bath built in the second decade of the third century AD and used for roughly 500 years thereafter. One of the largest of its kind in the Roman empire, its ruins now include a huge dried-up pool, many pillars, headstones and busts of the Roman period. Another significant ruin is that of a Roman theatre dating back to the second century AD and capable of seating 3,000 to 5,000 persons. There are, besides, the ruins of the Temple of Augustus, the Roman emperor whose deeds it celebrates, and the still intact 15-metre high column, Julianus Sutunu, erected to commemorate the Roman Emperor Julian's visit to what is now Ankara in 362 BC.
There are many mosques. The oldest one, built in 1178 AD, is the Aalaadin Camii, at the foot of the Ankara Castle at the Citadel; the largest is the Kocapate Mosque in Kizlay, with a capacity to sit 24,000 worshippers. The Ankara castle or Ankara Kalesi overlooks the city from a 978-metre high hill. While there are divergent views as to when it was first built, some trace its origins to the Hittites who were the dominant power in the region as far back as around 2,000 BC. One can find in it traces — including Greek and Roman inscriptions on its walls — of all the civilisations that have flourished in the region.
To those interested in the history of modern Turkey, however, the most lasting impression will be that of the AnitKabir (Memorial Tomb), the final resting place of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. An impressive and imaginatively laid out structure, it displays not only the personal belongings of the maker of Turkey as a modern, democratic nation but narrates, though an amazing combination of visuals, statues and commentary, the entire history of the War of Independence Turkey fought under him, of its establishment as a republic and its history thereafter. It stands out as an example of a grand memorial not only to a historic figure but of the events he shaped.