Ankara

Turkey's capital since 1923, Ankara reads first as a city of state — broad avenues, ministries, embassies — yet it is far older than the republic. A Byzantine citadel still holds the crag, and the climb runs up between wooden houses to ramparts that open onto the whole city. The Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, housed in a fifteenth-century covered market, gathers the finest Hittite collection anywhere, from stone lions to bronze stags. Anıtkabir, Atatürk's mausoleum, imposes its avenue of lions and its courts of pale limestone. Lower down, the Hacı Bayram quarter sets a fifteenth-century mosque against the walls of the Temple of Augustus. The city gave its name to angora wool, and its workshops still sell mohair by the metre. Beyond it opens the Anatolian plateau, with the Tuz salt lake and the Phrygian burial mounds of Gordion.