Ankara's essential sights are Anıtkabir, where the Atatürk and War of Independence Museum reaches beneath the hall of honour; the Museum of Anatolian Civilisations, below the castle; the castle and the old quarter inside its walls; and, in Ulus, the two buildings in which the Grand National Assembly sat from 1920 until 1960. Then come the Hacı Bayram Veli Mosque, built against the Temple of Augustus, the Roman Baths, the Ethnography Museum and the restored houses of Hamamönü. Further out, Gordion, Beypazarı, the lakes of Eymir and Mogan and the forests of Soğuksu each make a day. Below they are grouped by area; every place has its own guide on this site with the visiting details.
Anıtkabir and the Atatürk museum
The museum is entered through the Misak-ı Millî tower, on the right as you look from the ceremonial court towards the mausoleum. It opened in 1960 as the Anıtkabir Atatürk Museum. In 2002 it was extended into the columned space under the hall of honour and took its present name.
There are four parts. The first holds things Atatürk used, gifts he received from foreign statesmen and belongings donated by his adopted daughters. The second has the panorama and oil paintings of Gallipoli, the battle of Sakarya and the Great Offensive. The third covers the national struggle and the reforms from 1919 to 1938, and includes the tomb chamber. The fourth is his own library, 3,123 books on display.
The castle and the old town around it
Nobody knows when Ankara Castle was first built; it was already there when the Galatians arrived, and the Romans repaired it. The inner wall is Byzantine work of the 7th century, rebuilt in the 9th, and it carries forty-two pentagonal towers fourteen to sixteen metres high, while the outer wall wraps round in the shape of a heart. Many houses of Ottoman Ankara still stand inside. In the İç Hisar quarter, the Alaaddin Mosque has a minber whose inscription dates the first mosque on the spot to 1178.
The Museum of Anatolian Civilisations occupies two Ottoman buildings below the castle, the Mahmut Paşa covered market and the Kurşunlu Han. Founded as a Hittite museum, it gradually took in the other civilisations of Anatolia too; what is on show in the galleries is under five per cent of the collection. The city's first museum had opened in 1921 in a castle tower, Akkale, and the first rooms here received visitors in 1943; the present name dates from 1968.
Two private museums sit near the castle. The Erimtan Archaeology and Art Museum, the first private museum in Ankara, holds about two thousand objects, mostly from Anatolia and largely Late Hellenistic and Roman, arranged to give a picture of everyday Roman life. Opposite the castle's main gate, the Rahmi M. Koç Museum, the city's first industrial museum, fills the Çengelhan and the Safranhan of 1511 with more than four thousand objects in 32 rooms, from models and steam engines to classic cars.
Two old mosques stand close to the castle. The Aslanhane Mosque of 1290, beside the citadel, is built on wooden posts and beams; it is on the World Heritage List, the second cultural property in Ankara to be inscribed after Gordion, and it takes its everyday name from an ancient marble lion set into the wall of the tomb of Ahi Şerafettin opposite. The Ahi Elvan Mosque in Koyunpazarı went up between 1331 and 1389 in the quarter of the Ahis, a brotherhood of craftsmen, and is worth entering for its wooden interior carved in the Seljuk tradition.
Ulus: the assembly buildings and the early Republic
The War of Independence Museum was begun in 1916 as a club house for the Committee of Union and Progress and left unfinished; when the Grand National Assembly was to open on 23 April 1920, no other building in Ankara would serve, so it was completed with roof tiles taken from the town's houses. Built of pink and purple Ankara stone, it housed the assembly until 15 October 1924. The Republic Museum is the second assembly building, designed by Vedat Tek and used as parliament from 1924 to 1960. Atatürk delivered his Great Speech in its chamber over six days in October 1927, and the displays cover the first three presidents, Atatürk, İnönü and Bayar.
Directly opposite the Republic Museum stands Ankara Palas, built between 1924 and 1927. As a hotel and guest house it held the republic balls and received guests such as King Amanullah Khan of Afghanistan and Dwight Eisenhower; it has been the Ankara Palas Museum since 21 February 2024. On Ulus Square, the Economic Independence Museum of Türkiye İş Bankası occupies the bank's head office of 1929 by Giulio Mongeri, with an oval hall lit through a glass ceiling. In the square, the monument of 1927 shows two soldiers at the front, a woman carrying shells on the back, and Atatürk on horseback at the top.
In the station grounds at Ulus, a stone house of 1892 was Atatürk's headquarters and home from 27 December 1919; the treaty with France was signed there on 21 October 1921, the ground floor is now a railway museum, and upstairs his reception room, study and bedroom are kept as they were. Ulucanlar Prison, in use from 1925 to 2006, became a museum in 2011; wax figures fill its wards, and its courtyards tell of the writers held there, Nâzım Hikmet and Yaşar Kemal among them.
Hacı Bayram, Roman Ankara and Hamamönü
The Hacı Bayram Veli Mosque leans against the wall of the Temple of Augustus; it was first built in 1427–28. Against its qibla wall, the tomb of 1429 holds nine pine cenotaphs, Hacı Bayram's own and those of eight sheikhs who followed him. On Çankırı Caddesi in Ulus, the Roman Baths keep the outline of an exercise court and a bath that coins date to the reign of Caracalla, between AD 212 and 217.
The Ethnography Museum was built in 1925–26 to a design by Arif Hikmet Koyunoğlu, and its entrance hall was Atatürk's temporary grave from 1938 until his body went to Anıtkabir in 1953. Its halls run from Seljuk and Ottoman woodwork to manuscripts, tiles, carpets and kilims. The Museum of Foundation Works shows, among pieces from every region, the thirteenth-century wooden shutters of the Ahi Evran Mosque and the doors of the Great Mosque of Divriği.
Hamamönü is named after the double bath of Karacabey, which still stands. Its nineteenth-century timber houses and mansions have been restored, and Mehmet Akif Ersoy, who wrote the national anthem here, has a house museum in the park that bears his name. The quarter also has the Gökyay Foundation Chess Museum, with sets from 111 countries. At Sıhhiye Square, the Hatti Monument of 1974 copies a ritual object 24 centimetres high from Alacahöyük, now in the Museum of Anatolian Civilisations; the ministry points out that it belongs to the Hatti, not the Hittites.
Day trips: Gordion, Beypazarı, lakes and forests
Gordion, the capital of Phrygia and a World Heritage Site since 2023, lies at Yassıhüyük, some ninety kilometres south-west of central Ankara. People lived on this spot for more than four thousand years, and it was the centre of the Phrygian kingdom under Midas; its great burial mounds are the first thing you see on the plain. The Gordion Museum in the village sets out the finds period by period. The Sakarya battlefield, a historical national park across Polatlı and Haymana, is split into twenty-four parcels; its directorate calls the battle the longest pitched battle in world history.
Beypazarı has three hands-on museums founded by the culture scholar Zehra Sema Demir. In the Living Museum, set in the Abbaszade mansion, costumed narrators replace cases and labels, and visitors make block prints or watch a shadow play. The Turkish Bath Museum fills the sixteenth-century Rüstem Pasha Bath, and the Living Village is at Macun, eight kilometres out of town.
Eymir Lake sits in woodland that Middle East Technical University planted on bare steppe from the 1960s, and its rowing and sailing teams train on the water. Its neighbour Mogan, twenty kilometres south of the city at Gölbaşı, has records of two hundred and twenty-six bird species, the white-headed duck among them. Soğuksu National Park, eighty kilometres north at Kızılcahamam, is pine forest on volcanic ground full of hot and cold springs that are used as spas. Çubuk Karagöl, 68 kilometres from Ankara, is a forest lake laid out for picnics. Each place's own page carries the visiting details and, where the source gives them, opening hours and fees.
