Ankara — Capital of Turkey

Ankara is a genuinely ancient settlement — it appears in Hittite records under the name Ankuwash more than 3,000 years ago and later grew as the Phrygian, then Galatian, then Roman city of Ancyra, a major Roman provincial capital whose surviving Temple of Augustus and Rome (built to house the famous Res Gestae inscription of Emperor Augustus) still stands in the city today. But for most of the intervening centuries, it was a significant regional city rather than the seat of an empire.

That changed abruptly in the 20th century. Ankara was not the Ottoman Empire's capital — Constantinople (Istanbul) held that role for nearly five centuries — but Mustafa Kemal Atatürk chose Ankara as his revolutionary base during the Turkish War of Independence (1919–1923), largely because its position deep in Anatolia, far from the Allied naval forces occupying Istanbul after World War I, made it more defensible and symbolically distanced from the discredited, occupied imperial capital.

When the Republic of Turkey was formally proclaimed on 29 October 1923, Atatürk designated Ankara, not Istanbul, as the new republic's capital — a deliberate break from Ottoman tradition that also served a practical nation-building purpose: relocating the seat of government to central Anatolia helped orient the new secular republic away from the multi-ethnic, cosmopolitan, imperially-associated identity of Istanbul and toward a Turkish Anatolian heartland the republic's founders wanted to center nationally.

Ankara in 1923 was a comparatively small provincial town, and the new republic undertook a rapid, state-directed program of urban planning and construction through the 1920s–1930s to build it into a functioning modern capital, including government ministry buildings, Atatürk's own residence (later mausoleum site, Anıtkabir, completed in 1953 after his 1938 death), and a planned street grid quite different from Istanbul's much older, organically grown urban fabric.

Today Ankara functions as Turkey's political and administrative center while Istanbul remains its far larger economic, cultural, and historical hub — a split not unlike several other countries that separate political and commercial capitals, though in Turkey's case the split was a deliberate 20th-century political statement rather than a long-standing historical arrangement.

Ankara is also home to the vast Anıtkabir complex and to the diplomatic quarter of Çankaya, where foreign embassies and the Turkish presidency have historically been based, and the city's relatively planned, 20th-century layout — a direct product of the republic's founding-era urban design ambitions — stands in visible contrast to the far older, denser, and more organically evolved street patterns of Istanbul just a few hundred kilometers to the northwest.

Ankara Castle, a fortification with origins stretching back to Galatian and Roman times and substantially rebuilt under later Byzantine and Islamic rule, still stands on a hill overlooking the old city center, giving Ankara a visible medieval and ancient core alongside the government's 20th-century republican-era planned districts built up around it.

Ankara's role as a major university and research center, anchored by institutions including Ankara University (founded shortly after the republic itself) and several other national universities established through the 20th century, reflects the early republic's broader emphasis on building modern secular educational institutions in the new capital rather than relying solely on Istanbul's older Ottoman-era academic establishments.

Long before its 20th-century political rise, the city gave Europe the old name Angora, source of both the long-haired Angora goat, prized for centuries for its fine mohair wool exported along Anatolian trade routes, and the Angora rabbit, whose soft wool became a European luxury textile; the modern spelling 'Ankara' was formally adopted only in the early republican period, part of the same wave of place-name standardization that touched cities across the new Turkish state.

Turkey's Grand National Assembly first convened in Ankara in 1920, three years before the republic was even proclaimed, meeting in a modest building where Atatürk and fellow independence leaders coordinated the war effort against occupying and rival forces; that original assembly hall now houses the War of Independence Museum, distinct from the larger, purpose-built parliament complex constructed later in the republican era to house the growing legislature. A short walk from the Roman Temple of Augustus, the 15th-century Hacı Bayram Mosque, built beside and partly incorporating the ancient temple's ruins, remains an active place of worship today and one of the clearest examples anywhere in the city of Ottoman religious architecture layered directly atop its Roman predecessor.