Tag Archives: Ankara

Ankara and Ataturk

Ankara is a very interesting city for a tourist because it isn’t very touristy. I felt like I was seeing an actual Turkish big city, though I’m aware that most of Istanbul is less touristy than the area I have been staying in. (Interesting side note, I felt like I saw fewer women wearing headscarves in Ankara than in Istanbul.)

In the morning, I went to the museum at Ataturk’s Mausoleum. There were so many Turkish tour buses and school groups! It’s necessary to understand what Ataturk is to Turks in order to understand Turkey today, I think. He pretty much single-handedly revolutionized the country, being the prime figure in (literally) fighting for and creating the Republic of Turkey, switching to a Western alphabet, ensuring women’s rights, separating religion and the state (and its application to the legal system by removing religious law), even setting up last names since they didn’t really previously exist in Turkey. As my liberal hotel manager here states quite simply, he loves Ataturk. And really, love him or hate him (as many of the country’s very religious conservatives may), he elicits really strong feelings. I can understand that, although such a strong feeling about one man seems very much like a personality cult to my foreign eyes. It’s like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, FDR, and JFK wrapped up in one person. I’m not sure other countries really have a single person like that.

The mausoleum is huge, with a museum about Turkey’s war for independence, and is situated on top of a hill in a park. I spent much of the morning there, learning some history and even more learning about Turks’ perceptions of their own history.

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After the Ataturk museum, I went to what for me was the prime attraction in Ankara, the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations. Sadly about half of it was closed, rendering the audio guide that I rented rather superfluous, but I did enjoy seeing the Hittite friezes and the beautiful delicate sculptures of a much later Anatolian civilization that I’m not sure I’d ever heard of before (something like Ururtians). Interestingly, the museum had just acquired some Trojan jewelry from the University of Pennsylvania.

Heading to the Capital!

I had planned to explore some of the cave churches outside of the Open Air Museum on my last morning in Goreme, but I was feeling rather under the weather and was leaning towards not walking there in the heat. As I was chatting with the hotel owner, I mentioned this, and he offered to drive me to the church. He kindly chauffeured me around to the church and back to the bus station where I bought my ticket!

The church was another lovely example of cave churches, and had some frescoes left:

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I then bought my ticket to Ankara, trying my fourth Turkish bus company, Suha. (They were quite good.) I needed to kill some time, so I walked around the town, finally sitting in the shade on a bench by the mosque. An older man came by and said “welcome to Goreme”. We got to chatting a little bit, and he told me he had lived in Belgium for a time. So we spoke in a mix of English and French, and then he invited me to take some tea in his shop across the way. I told him that unfortunately I was meeting someone, which I felt bad about because he seemed quite nice and harmless, but I’m still a little wary of nice Turkish men as I never know what unfortunate stereotypes they may have heard about American women and I didn’t want another awkward situation like that in Pamukkale. However, his genuine niceness made a lovely bright spot in my day. I also had a bit of a laugh as a minute or two after a horse and carriage went by, this young ‘un did too:

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I had lunch in the same restaurant my Brazilian friend and I had eaten at the previous night. This time I knew what to order – gozelme, a delicious thin stuffed bread. The restaurant owner gave everyone a little clay pot with attached evil eye bead, and several of us (all tourists of course) started chatting. It was a lovely lunch, which also killed most of the remaining time before my bus. I returned to the hotel to pick up my bags, they gave me a lift to the bus station, and I was on my way to the capital!

I found my hotel with no trouble as it was right across the street from a metro stop. I was grateful for the ease of finding the place, and decided to have a quiet evening writing a blog entry and eating soup in the hotel.

The hotel restaurant was deserted – they actually had to turn on the lights for me! They have an old record player so I got to hear Frank Sinatra, though at the end they turned on a pop music station. (No offense to anyone intended, but the Turkish music videos I saw were hilariously awful!) I tried to get the check but the first two times I asked, they thought I had asked for tea (chai not check!). Eventually I did get my check however, and made my exit to my room.