Ankara tends to live in Istanbul's shadow, but it's the capital of Turkey and a city of enormous symbolic weight: this is where the modern Turkish Republic was born in the 1920s, and where its founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, is buried, in a monumental mausoleum that is a place of national pilgrimage. It isn't a city of romantic postcards or grand Ottoman mosques, but an administrative, modern and university capital, largely planned in the 20th century. Yet for the curious traveller it has two or three gems that more than justify a stop.
The first is Anıtkabir, Atatürk's mausoleum: a sober, grandiose complex on a hill, with its long avenue of lions, its esplanade and its museum, where you can understand the founding of modern Turkey. The second is the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, considered one of the best archaeological museums in the world, with Hittite, Phrygian and Urartian pieces and finds from Neolithic Çatalhöyük that sum up ten thousand years of history. And the third is the old citadel on the hill, with its restored old town, its Ottoman houses and its views.
This guide helps you make the most of Ankara even if you only have a day: what you absolutely must see, how much admission costs, how to get around by metro with the AnkaraKart, where to eat a good döner or try Central Anatolian cooking, and how to link the capital by high-speed train with Konya, Cappadocia or Istanbul. Ankara doesn't dazzle at first sight, but it rewards those who stop: it's the gateway to understanding contemporary Turkey and an open-air museum of the civilisations that peopled Anatolia for millennia.
Ankara's citadel hill has been inhabited for thousands of years: Hittites, Phrygians (it was an important city in the kingdom of the legendary King Midas), Lydians and Persians all passed through here, before the Galatians, a Celtic people who arrived from Europe in the 3rd century BC, made it their capital under the name Ancyra. Under Rome it was a prosperous city in the province of Galatia —the famous inscription of Emperor Augustus, the Monumentum Ancyranum, comes from here—, and later it remained a Byzantine, Seljuk and Ottoman centre, famous for the wool of its Angora goats (which gave its name to mohair and to Angora cats and rabbits). Its great moment came in the 20th century: in 1920, Atatürk set up the headquarters of the Turkish national movement here during the War of Independence, and in 1923 the new Republic of Turkey named it capital in place of Istanbul. From a dusty town on the plateau, Ankara became a modern planned capital. All that history, from the Galatians to Atatürk, is told on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The heart of the Anatolian plateau: the land of Hittites and Phrygians, Atatürk's capital of Ankara, the Christian Cappadocia of the rock-cut churches, the Konya of the dervishes and Ottoman Safranbolu.
Read the history of Central Anatolia and the Black Sea →If you book from here we earn a commission and you pay no more. Prices and availability come from Civitatis.
No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The hill where Ankara's citadel stands today has been inhabited for thousands of years, and some of the oldest civilisations in Anatolia passed through it. In the second millennium BC, the region was within the orbit of the Hittite Empire, the great power of the plateau. After its fall, around the 8th century BC, the site was an important city of the kingdom of Phrygia, the land of the legendary kings Midas and Gordias. According to tradition, the city's founding was credited to Midas, and its ancient name, Ancyra, meant 'anchor' in Greek, supposedly because one was found on the site.
Next came the Lydians of King Croesus and then the Persian Empire, which brought it into its great network of royal roads. But the episode that left the most curious mark was the arrival, in the 3rd century BC, of an unexpected people: the Galatians, Celtic tribes who had migrated from central Europe, crossed the Balkans and moved into Asia Minor. These Celtic warriors settled in central Anatolia, in a region that took the name Galatia from them, and made Ancyra one of their capitals. It is one of the few traces of the Celtic world in Asia.
For centuries those Galatians kept their Celtic language and customs in the very heart of Anatolia. It was to them, by then Christian and under Roman rule, that the apostle Paul wrote his famous Epistle to the Galatians, one of the texts of the New Testament. Ancient Ankara was an unusual crossroads of worlds: Hittite, Phrygian, Persian, Greek and Celtic, layers of history that still show in the reused stones of its walls.
When Rome annexed Galatia in 25 BC, Ancyra became the capital of the new province and enjoyed centuries of splendour. It was a wealthy, well-connected city, with temples, baths, a theatre and a busy commercial life at the crossroads of Anatolia's routes. From that period comes one of the most valuable documents of all Antiquity: the Monumentum Ancyranum, the best-preserved copy of the Res Gestae Divi Augusti. This is the political testament in which Emperor Augustus summed up his achievements, and it was carved into the walls of the city's Temple of Augustus and Rome. You can still see it today next to the Hacı Bayram Mosque.
When the Roman Empire split, Ancyra became part of the Byzantine Empire. It remained an important military and religious centre, the seat of councils and a bishopric, but it was also a target of Sasanian Persian raids and, later, Arab ones. The citadel on the hill was fortified again and again, reusing ancient columns and blocks that can still be picked out in its walls.
Throughout the Middle Ages and the Ottoman period, the city, known as Angora, was famous all over the world for one very particular product: the long, fine, silky wool of the angora goats raised on the plateau. It was used to make mohair, a luxury fabric much prized in Europe. The name 'angora' also became attached to the region's long-haired cats and rabbits. Angora was also the scene of a key historical event: in 1402, at the Battle of Ankara, the Turco-Mongol conqueror Tamerlane defeated and captured the Ottoman sultan Bayezid I, a blow that nearly finished off the young Ottoman Empire.
Under the long Ottoman rule, Angora gradually lost importance. It remained a trading centre, home to the mohair industry and the capital of a province, but it shrank into a dusty town on the Anatolian plateau, far behind great Istanbul, the imperial capital on the Bosphorus. By the early 20th century it was a modest place, hit by fires that destroyed many of its wooden houses, with nothing to hint at what lay ahead.
Everything changed after the First World War. The defeated Ottoman Empire was occupied by the Allied powers, and Istanbul fell under foreign control. In response to that humiliation, a Turkish national movement emerged, led by General Mustafa Kemal, later called Atatürk ('father of the Turks'). In 1919-1920, Kemal chose Angora, in central Anatolia, far from the coast and from the enemy, as the base of the resistance. On 23 April 1920, the Grand National Assembly of Turkey met there for the first time. This revolutionary parliament challenged the sultan's government and would lead the Turkish War of Independence.
From those modest buildings in Angora, now the museums of the War of Independence and of the Republic, the fight was organised against the armies occupying the country, above all the Greek army. It was a hard war, and it ended in 1922 with a Turkish victory. The small town on the plateau had become the political heart of a nation that was being born. Its central position, easy to defend and served by the railway, had made it the ideal headquarters for a revolution.
The Republic of Turkey was proclaimed on 29 October 1923, and shortly before that, on 13 October, Ankara had been declared its capital instead of Istanbul. The decision was both symbolic and practical. Atatürk and his circle wanted to break with the Ottoman, imperial past that Istanbul stood for and mark the start of a new state that was secular and modern. They also wanted the capital in the centre of the country, away from the borders and the old court. Ankara, the city of the resistance, embodied the new Turkey.
But in 1923 Ankara was a town of just a few tens of thousands of people, with none of the infrastructure a capital needs. It had to be built almost from scratch. The government commissioned urban plans from architects and planners, among them the Austrian Hermann Jansen, to create a modern capital with wide boulevards, ministries, embassies, parks and residential neighbourhoods, following the European planning ideas of the time. This is how the main axes of the new city (Ulus, Kızılay, Çankaya) came about. They make up modern Ankara today, very different from the historic maze around the citadel.
The city grew quickly over the 20th century, drawing civil servants, students and migrants from all over Anatolia, until its metropolitan area passed five million people. It filled up with universities, cultural institutions and seats of power. Like any fast-growing big city, it also had its problems: informal neighbourhoods (gecekondu) on the outskirts, traffic and pollution. But Ankara firmly established itself as the administrative and political capital, the place where the Turkish state makes its decisions.
Today's Ankara is a large, modern capital of more than five million people. It is home to the government, the parliament and the embassies, and it is also a major university city. It doesn't have the tourist pull of Istanbul or Cappadocia, but it holds two monuments that sum up two sides of Anatolia's history, and each is worth the trip on its own.
The first is Anıtkabir, the mausoleum of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who died in 1938. Built between 1944 and 1953 on a hill, it is a sober, monumental complex that has become the country's great symbol and a place of pilgrimage. Millions of Turks visit it every year, and the most solemn official ceremonies are held there. Its museum covers the life of the founder and the War of Independence. There is no better place to understand modern Turkey, which is secular, republican and deeply tied to the figure of Atatürk.
The second is the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations. It is housed in an old Ottoman market next to the citadel, was named European Museum of the Year in 1997 and is considered one of the best archaeological museums in the world. Its rooms take you through ten thousand years of history: the Neolithic of Çatalhöyük, the Hittites, the Phrygians of Midas, the Urartians and the Assyrians. It's the best possible summary of why Anatolia is one of the cradles of civilisation. Between these two visits, one to the founder of the modern nation and one to the ancient roots of his land, Ankara gives travellers something no other Turkish city brings together in quite the same way: the deep history of Anatolia and the birth of contemporary Turkey, face to face.
