Turkey In Photos - Ankara

The Byzantines held the town for centuries, with intermittent raids by the Persians and Arabs. When the Seljuk Turks came to Anatolia after 1071, they made Enguriye a Seljuk city, but held it with difficulty.  Ottoman possession of Ankara did not begin well, for it was near the town that Sultan Yildirim Beyazit was captured by Mongols and the Sultan later died in captivity. But after the Mongols collapsed and the Ottoman civil war ended, Ankara became merely a quiet town where long-haired goats were raised.

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Modern Ankara is a planned city. When Ataturk set up his provisional government here in 1920, it was a small, rather dusty Anatolian town of some 30,000 people, with a strategic position at the heart of the country. After his victory in the War of Independence, Ataturk declared this the new capital of the country (October, 1923) and set about developing it. European urban planners were consulted and the plan resulted in a city of long, wide boulevards, a large forested park with an artificial lake, a cluster of transportation terminals and numerous residential and diplomatic neighbourhoods. From 1919 to 1927 , Ataturk did not set foot in the old imperial capital of Istanbul, preferring to work at making Ankara the country’s capital city.

Ataturk’s mausoleum, called the Anitkabir, stands atop a small hill in a green park.  If you saw Ankara from the Hisar or the terrace of the Ethnography Museum, you‘ve already admired from a distance the rectangular mausoleum, with squared columns around its sides, on the hill.  A visit to the tomb is essential when you visit Ankara.

As you enter the tomb past its huge bronze doors, you must remove your hat.  The lofty hall is lined in red marble and decorated sparingly with mosaics in timeless Turkish folk designs. At the northern end stands the immense marble sarcophagus, cut from a single piece of stone.

The Anitkabir was begun in 1944 and finished in 1953.  Its design seeks to capture the spirit of Anatolia: monumental, spare but beautiful. Echoes of several great Anatolian empires, from the Hittites through the Romans and Seljuks, are included in its design, though the final effect is modern, but somehow timeless as well.