Ankara, Turkiye

Ankara is Turkiye’s capital city and is very large. We stayed in a wealthy part of the city but it still took about an hour to get into the old town on the bus. Our neighbourhood was nice with an expensive shopping mall and a great bakery where we bought fresh, hot simits (Turkish bagels) every day.

Roman Baths

The old town is quite extensive and incorporates Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman structures. We started by exploring the Roman Baths. These were one of the largest Roman baths in the world. The site contained a temple, several bathing rooms of different temperatures including a very large hot bath and a very large cold bath. The ‘museum’ also included other Roman stuff that they discovered in the area – tomb stones, pillars, capitals, etc. It was very interesting walking around this site and I would recommend it for anyone visiting Ankara.

Temple of Augustus

After the baths, we walked over to the Temple of Augustus and the Haci Bayram mosque. The mosque was built next to where the ancient Roman temple is located. The temple had inscriptions in both ancient Greek and Latin which helped translators at the time ‘crack’ the two languages. The mosque itself wasn’t that interesting. There was the tomb of Haci Bayram (a 15th century Sufi teacher) on the side of the mosque that many people where lined up for and it was really crowded. When we tried to go in, the women were sent into a side entrance straight into the basement which was just empty with no interesting paintings, tiles or decorations. R said that the main entrance wasn’t that interesting either.

After exploring this area, the plan was to head through the old town and up to the castle on the hill, but we were all tired and decided to head home. Unfortunately, we never made it back to explore the castle and surrounding area but the photos of it look good.

Attaturk’s tomb

On another day, we took the bus to the closest stop near Attaturk’s tomb and walked the half hour through the neighborhood over to this imposing structure. The tomb itself was quite impressive and in a massive building. We also visited the museum which I thought was going to be small, but turned out to be huge. We only had 15 minutes to explore the museum before the changing of the guard so we rushed through so that we would miss it.

Next stop: Cappadocia