Ankara- What you need to know

You may trace Ankara’s history back to the Bronze Age Hatti culture, in which the Hittites succeeded in the 2nd millennium BC, the Phrygians in the 10th century BC, and the Lydians, Persians, and Ottomans in the centuries that followed.

Gravestones from the Roman era show that the Phrygian nature of the peasantry persisted even after Lydian and Persian domination had taken over. Once the Persians were defeated by Alexander the Great of Macedon, their rule ended.

Alexander the Great came to Ankara in 333 BC from Gordion and conquered the city during his brief stay there. Antigonus received Ankara and the surrounding area as part of the empire that was divided among Alexander’s generals after his death at Babylon in 323 BC. Except during the Phrygian period, when the city grew the most, the town was founded and developed over time.

In 278 BC, the Celtic-speaking Galatians conquered the city and the rest of central Anatolia, making Ankara the capital of the Tectosage tribe. While the Trocmi called modern-day Balhisar home, the Tolstibogii called the area of Ankara their home.

Ancyra was the city’s name back then. At the ending of the 4th century, St. Jerome, born in Galatia, noticed that the language spoken in the area around Ankara was very similar to the language spoken in the northwest of the Roman world near Trier. It could be evidence that the older generation had assimilated the native Phrygian language. Following Augustus’s conquest of the city in 25 BC, it fell under Roman control. With its newfound status as the Roman province of Galatia’s capital, Ancyra retained its position as a central economic hub.

Following the Ottoman defeat in World War I, the Ottoman capital Istanbul and much of Anatolia was occupied by the Allies, who planned to share these lands between Armenia, France, Greece, Italy and the United Kingdom, leaving for the Turks the core piece of land in central Anatolia. In response, the leader of the Turkish nationalist movement, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, established the headquarters of his resistance movement in Angora in 1920. After the Turkish War of Independence was won and the Treaty of Sèvres was superseded by the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), the Turkish nationalists replaced the Ottoman Empire with the Republic of Turkey on 29 October 1923. A few days earlier, Angora had officially replaced Istanbul as the new Turkish capital city, on 13 October 1923, and Republican officials declared that the city’s name was Ankara.

New construction separated Ankara’s old neighborhood of Ulus from the city’s new neighborhood of Yenişehir after it became the capital of the newly founded Republic of Turkey.

The new team, centered around Kızılay, had the trappings of a more modern city: wide streets, hotels, theaters, shopping malls, and high-rises. Government offices and foreign embassies have also been located in the new section.