Altınköy is a village that was built to be looked at: an open-air museum in Altındağ, on the northern edge of Ankara, that reconstructs rural life as it was lived between the 1930s and the 1950s. The setting runs to roughly five hundred dönüm, so it is walked rather than toured from a doorway.
What stands on the ground is a working village layout rather than a row of exhibits — traditional houses, a village coffee house, the headman's office, barns and vegetable plots, and around them a mosque, a school, a grocer's, a mill, a suspension bridge and the lanes that join them together. Old crafts and everyday routines are demonstrated on site, and the natural and organic produce made in the village is sold to visitors.
Getting there
The museum is on 512. Cadde in the Beşikkaya neighbourhood of Altındağ. Wear shoes you can walk in: the grounds are large and mostly outdoors, so the weather decides how comfortable the visit is.
When to go
- Climate
- Across Ankara as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 0.4 °C in January to 23.6 °C in August; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in May, June, July, August and September; rainfall is heaviest in May (52 mm) and lightest in August (13 mm). Long-term means for 1927-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
