Ankara: Then and Now, Through My Eyes
It’s hard to believe fifty years have passed since I first walked the streets of Ankara, a college student on break with waist length hair and a backpack stuffed with 6 weeks of “essentials”. The city was simple, yet magnetic and foreign. My traveling companion, a multi-lingual American expat, was my guide/translator/cultural ambassador. He made the introductions and so began my love affair with Turkey.
Mornings rang with the sound of vendors calling out “Simit, taze simit!” (vaguely like a sesame encrusted bagel), the aromas of warm bread and rich, dark roasted coffee. It was early spring, days were still cool. In the chai houses, men played endless games of backgammon.
Kızılay was the heart of everything — a bustling crossroads in the center of the city.
I remember the old buses, painted in faded colors, groaning up the hills toward Çankaya. There were fewer cars, more bicycles, and always women carrying baskets from the market.
There was a dignity to Ankara even then. A city of teachers, soldiers, and dreamers akin to the great leader and visionary, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Turkish people united in a belief in this new Republic, declared in 1923 when reforms were seismic! Click on photos below to enlarge.
Yet there were traces of the ancient in cobblestone streets, wooden Ottoman houses leaning together in the old quarter, in prayer calls from minarets scattered over the city.
This New Ankara – a Transformation
When I returned in October, I was startled by the new Ankara, a gleaming metropolis . Ankara has grown up — taller, shinier, busier. The skyline sparkles with glass towers, and the metro glides smoothly beneath streets that once echoed with tram bells. There are hip cafés in every neighborhood now, and students fill them with laptops, opinions on a new world order and Turkey’s place in it. Click on photos below to enlarge.
But what moves me most is what hasn’t changed. The warmth. The hospitality. The way a shopkeeper still insists you sit for tea, even if you’re only buying a postcard. And the passion for this republic, their independence and richly complex history.
The way people still pause for a moment of respect at Anıtkabir, gazing up at the great patriot Atatürk’s resting place, their faces touched by quiet pride. The same Ankara that once welcomed a young “hippie” traveler with open arms now greets me like an old friend. We have both changed but the familiarity and affection remain.
Back in the 70’s my favorite view was overlooking called Çankaya. My friend and I would park his car and sip raki, admiring its beauty. Jeweled onyx, was his description. Now it offers a view of a modern, bustling district known for being the center of government, hosting most foreign embassies, and home to top universities and hospitals
I can still hear the echo of the old city — the call of the simit seller, the laughter of friends in a warm brightly lit kebab shop, the promise of a future that seemed so wide and bright. Ankara kept that promise.
What an incredible photo essay capture of a world traveler’s circular journey, returning to such a meaningful waypoint along your life’s odyssey. Though during this pass of your nonlinear and wandering global circumabulation, and with your eyes still shining brightly with endless wonder, you no doubt now experience the place and its people with a greater sophistication, and knowledge, and depth. So it seems your voyage’s periplus is really one of a spiral, upwardly co-created with life, still holding the form a circle with its appropriate nostalgia, but now from a path upon a different plane than what that wandering, beautiful and wide-eyed college student must have taken, when you were still just dreaming the life that would lie ahead. A bon voyage, indeed.