The castle is one of Ankara's emblems and its history runs as long as the city's. Nobody knows when it was first built: it already stood when the Galatians settled here, and the Romans repaired it. What can be dated is the inner wall, raised by the Byzantines in the 7th century, damaged in the Byzantine wars and rebuilt in the 9th. When the outer wall was added is still not established.
Two years after the battle of Manzikert the Seljuks took the region, and the castle was repaired and enlarged under them. A Seljuk inscription recording that work survives on the north-west side, and another, this one Ilkhanid, sits above one of the gates.
It has more than twenty towers. The outer castle wraps around Ankara in the shape of a heart; the inner castle is four storeys high, built partly of Ankara stone and partly of stone gathered from elsewhere, with two great gates — the Outer Gate and the Hisar Gate. The inner walls carry forty-two pentagonal towers between fourteen and sixteen metres tall.
Inside the walls a great many houses of Ottoman Ankara still stand. The hill it occupies rises 110 metres above the Bent stream that runs beside it.
Getting there
- Access
- The citadel is in Altındağ and public transport along that route reaches it. You can also get off at the Ulus metro station and walk up in about fifteen minutes.
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).
