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Ankara is a city with two histories so different they barely seem to belong to the same place. The ancient settlement on the rocky citadel hill above the Ankara River has been occupied continuously since the Bronze Age. The Galatians made it their capital in 278 BC, the Romans turned it into a significant provincial city with an estimated 200,000 inhabitants under Augustus, and he left his political testament, the Res Gestae Divi Augusti, inscribed in the walls of his temple here. Those walls survive, readable, in the Monumentum Ancyranum. Then in 1923, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk chose Ankara as the capital of the new Turkish Republic, and the city of 35,000 people began its transformation into a metropolitan area of nearly 6 million.

The contrast between these two Ankaras is walkable.

Ulus, the old district, clusters around the Ankara Castle on its basalt hill, with the Roman Column of Julian (4th century AD), Byzantine churches, Ottoman hans, and the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations housed in a 15th-century covered bazaar all within a short walk of each other. That museum holds Hittite and Phrygian artifacts including what are considered the oldest known musical instruments and the Alaca Hoyuk bronze sun discs from the 3rd millennium BC. Yenisehir, the modern section built from the 1920s onward, centers on Kizilay Square, with the broad avenues and government ministries that Atatürk's urban planners laid out on a grid designed for a capital city rather than a market town.