Ankara

History & background

Ankara is a city that was founded twice: once in antiquity and once in the 20th century. The first founding lies more than 3,000 years back. Hittites, Phrygians, Galatians and Romans settled here one after another; the city was then called Ancyra, Latin for "anchor". The Romans built a theatre, baths and the Temple of Augustus, whose ruins still stand in the middle of the old Ulus district. Carved into the walls of this temple is the record of Emperor Augustus's deeds, the "Res Gestae Divi Augusti", one of the most important Latin inscriptions in the world. Byzantium and later the Ottoman sultans controlled Ankara, but the city remained a rather insignificant Anatolian provincial town of a few thousand inhabitants. For centuries Ankara was known above all as the centre of Angora wool; the fleece of the Angora goat bred in the region even gave the city its European name. The second founding came in 1923. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of the Turkish Republic, chose Ankara as the new capital, a deliberate decision against Istanbul, which was seen as Ottoman, cosmopolitan and shaped by the West. The new capital was to be modern, Turkish and forward-looking. Within a few decades Ankara grew from a small town of 30,000 into a planned metropolis. Wide boulevards, neoclassical ministries and parks were laid out on the drawing board: a city that was built rather than grown. The most important monument of this era is Anıtkabir, Atatürk's mausoleum, inaugurated in 1953. It sits enthroned on a hill and gives the founding father a monument somewhere between an ancient temple and modern monumental architecture. For Turks it is a national shrine; millions come every year to honour Atatürk. If you want to understand how Turkey sees itself, visit this place. Today Ankara, with 5 million inhabitants, is the second-largest city in Turkey. It is a city of civil servants, a university city, a city of embassies and ministries. Tourists rarely come, which is a mistake. In the Museum of Anatolian Civilisations, Ankara holds one of the most important archaeological collections in the world: Hittite sculptures, Bronze Age jewellery and artefacts from Hattusa, the capital of the mighty Hittite Empire that could stand up to Egypt and Mesopotamia.