Things to do
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Anıtkabir
The mausoleum of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk on a hill above the city, approached along an avenue of stone lions, with a museum below the courtyard covering the war of independence. The changing of the guard runs on the hour.
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Ankara Castle
The Byzantine and Seljuk citadel on the hill above Ulus, with a village of timber houses inside the walls and a rampart walk that takes in the whole plateau. The lanes below it sell copper and spices.
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Atatürk Forest Farm and Zoo
The model farm Atatürk founded in 1925 on marshland to prove the plateau could be cultivated, now parkland with a replica of his birthplace in Thessaloniki and a working dairy. It is the city's largest green space.
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CerModern
The republic's old railway workshops on the Ankara line, converted in 2010 into the city's contemporary art space, with the tracks left in the floor. Its programme is the liveliest in Ankara.
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Erimtan Archaeology and Arts Museum
A private collection of Anatolian coins, glass and small antiquities in restored houses below the castle, with a concert hall in the basement. It is the best-designed small museum in the city.
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Gordion
The Phrygian capital where Alexander is said to have cut the knot, with a royal tumulus of about 740 BC whose wooden burial chamber can be walked into and is the oldest standing timber structure in the world. It was listed by UNESCO in 2023.
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Hacı Bayram Mosque
The mosque of 1428 built beside the Roman temple around the tomb of the founder of the Bayrami order, and the most visited religious site in the city. The square outside it is always busy.
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Museum of Anatolian Civilizations
A restored Ottoman bedesten holding the Hittite, Hattian, Phrygian and Urartian collections, arranged so that ten thousand years of Anatolia read as one story. It is the single best reason to spend a day in Ankara.
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Temple of Augustus and Rome
The temple whose walls carry the fullest surviving copy of the Res Gestae, Augustus's own account of his reign, cut in Latin and Greek. It stands attached to a fifteenth-century mosque.
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Ulucanlar Prison Museum
The prison that held Turkey's political prisoners from 1925 until 2006, kept as it was and opened as a museum in 2011, with the cells, the gallows yard and the writers' wing. It is a hard visit and an honest one.