Ankara

Ankara is Turkey's capital and second-largest city (population 4 million). It has been a settlement since ancient times, but has only become a big city since the birth of the modern Turkish Republic in the 1920s. Its attractions include Anitkabir (Ataturk's Mausoleum), many museums including the amazing Anatolian Civilizations Museum, and the monuments and infrastructure of a modern capital (embassies, parliament, etc.). Ankara is situated on the dry but fertile central plateau, often referred to as the Anatolian heartland. Although it lacks the endless character, charm and history of Istanbul, Ankara is a nice place for a weekend and an important piece of understanding Turkey.

Turkish Fulbright Orientation

The Turkish Fulbright Commission invites all the Fulbright teachers, scholars and students in Turkey each year to Ankara for an excellent welcome and orientation program. This year the program was two days, Thursday and Friday October 3-4. Evie and Jesse took a bus Wednesday afternoon, and had a nice non-stop 5-hour ride to Ankara, complete with personal radios, dinner served like an airplane, and frequent çay. Our hotel was in the upscale Kavaklidere section of Ankara, home of many embassies and hotels. We had time for a nice walk around the neighborhood before bed.

On Thursday, we had a full program all day at the US Embassy, including introductions to the Fulbright staff, briefings on foreign policy, health and security, a nice lunch at a Turkish restaurant, and a video about Turkey. In the evening, we were all invited to the US Ambassador's Residence for a very nice reception with the Ambassador Robert Pearson. The residence was amazing, with a huge main hall opening out into a garden overlooking the city. It was fun to meet other Fulbrighters and US Embassy staff in such a wonderful setting. The evening of the good life made us want to enter the US Foreign Service!

Views of Ankara from our hotel
At the Ambassador's Residence with Fulbrighters Brendan and Tracey Williams from Seattle	Brendan and Tracey with US Ambassador to Turkey Robert Pearson, a very friendly host.
All of the US Fulbright Teachers in Turkey 2002-03, eating together in Ankara

After the reception, we enjoyed dinner with all of the other US Fulbright teachers. We found a very funky and comfortable cafe which felt like a little taste of Seattle in Turkey! We had all met in Washington, but this evening gave us a chance to relax and share experiences now that we are actually living in Turkey.

Day Two: The Sights

On Friday, we had a few more meetings at the Embassy, including a very interesting talk about Turkey's struggles to stop the smuggling of its antiquities and bring ancient artifacts back to Turkey. We learned how the rest of the world has taken amazing things from Turkey to put in their own museums. The talk included beautiful slides that got us excited about our trip to Turkey's greatest museum.

With the orientation program over, Fulbright bussed us to the old city, the ancient acropolis of Angora, for lunch in an old wooden Ottoman house.

The view from lunch, overlooking the Anatolian Civilizations Museum(the domes).

After lunch, Fulbright took us to the Anatolian Civilizations Museum, home to artifacts from every civilization that has lived in Anatolia back to the Paleolithic age. There is breathtakingly beautiful Hatti and Hittite artwork from 3000-4000 years ago, including many solar disks and deer statuettes.

Hittite solar disk Hittite deer statuette 4000-year-old breastfeeding mother

Through the ages, many other great civilizations besides the Hittites lived in this amazing land, the Assyrians, Phrygians, Greeks and Romans and more. The museum had pottery,sculpture, and other artifacts from each. The garden of the museum was also very nice, including a grove of trees filled with huge ancient pots.

So many old pots! What were they for?

Brendan filling in for a missing Greek head in the museum garden.

Exploring the City

After the museum, we walked up to the ancient citadel, the oldest part of the city. An amazing view from the old walls helped us put Ankara together in our minds. Ankara is a large, sprawling city, built in a dry, flat plain except for the citadel hill and the grey mountains in the distance. We located the government buildings, and the main street in town, Ataturk Bulvari. There were friendly local children on the citadel, selling handcrafts, pointing out landmarks, and practicing their impressive English.

Do you see Evie helping the local girls practice English?	Unfortunately, a very sunny and hazy day hides the city center (SW) from view.	Some local boys enjoying the view.

The vast majority of Ankara is a modern planned city, with wide boulevards and space set aside for parks and civic buildings. We enjoyed a nice park, where hundreds of Turks were enjoying the nice early evening by hanging out and eating sunflower seeds. After the park, we found a busy, fun pedestrian area of the city for dinner. We ate pide, roughly equivalent to Turkish pizza. Even Ankara's tourist areas had a more local and less touristy feel than Istanbul. After dinner, we walked all the way home along Ataturk Bulvari, a very pleasant evening.

Anitkabir (Atatürk's Mausoleum)

Besides the Citadel and the Museum, the tour books say the third must-see in Ankara is Anitkabir, the huge tomb and memorial to the undisputed father of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Turkey's love of Ataturk is a central, ubiquitous feature of life in Turkey, and worthy of its own page on this website. Since Ankara owes its place as capital of Turkey to the revolution that Ataturk led, it is appropriate that Ataturk be commemorated here with a major landmark. The mausoleum is a huge structure on a hill, with a large colonaded courtyard with the actual mausoleum sitting at one end.

We arrived Saturday morning at the same time as a troup of men and boys in traditional Ottoman costume. We found out they were here for a commemorative wreath-laying ceremony by the Ankara Club. The ceremony took place while we were inside the mausoleum. Some soldiers and important people laid a wreath of flowers on Ataturk's tomb, and the national anthem was played.

The wreath-laying ceremony at Ataturk's Tomb

Also at Anitkabir, we saw the dramatic changing of the guard. The guards march up the stairs, perform an elaborate set of motions, and then descend on the other side, all in perfect step.

The huge mausoleum complex houses a large museum about Ataturk and the founding of modern Turkey. The museum does a nice job of showing how this person lead a nation out of the shambles of the crumbled and defeated Ottoman empire, into a modern, secular republic. The museum helped us to better understand the homage the Turkish people pay to this man everyday. While the tomb reminded us of Kennedy's grave in the US, we realized that the US doesn't have any single hero like Turkey's Ataturk.

The Roman Baths

The last site we were able to catch in Ankara was the ruins of the Roman baths. The huge size of the complex, the endless rows of ornate Corinthian columns, and the evidence of heating and plumbing all impressed us with the Romans' engineering and sense of grandeur in public building.

The courtyard of the baths, with rows and rows of corinthian capitols.	The caldarium, one of the sections of the bath complex.	A Roman relaxing at the baths?

We caught a bus back Saturday afternoon, a double-decker bus this time, with a dining area on the lower level! The Anatolian countryside was pretty, but dry and largely unpopulated. We caught a sunset over the mountains.