ABSTRACT
The significance of the Ankara train station, Ulus and the thoroughfare connecting the two called Station Avenue cannot be underestimated. The pre-Republican arrival of the railway to Ankara in 1892 set the stage for its eventual destiny as a capital city in 1923 after the Turkish War of Independence. The procession up Station Avenue to Bruno Taut's catafalque consisted of all the same tropes as the Istanbul procession: the flag-draped coffin pulled on a gun carriage by rider-less horses, the display of Atatrk's Independence Medal by a general and the playing of Chopin's Funeral March by a military band. The design of Bruno Taut's catafalque continued many of the same funerary architecture elements that existed at the Dolmabahe catafalque: the platform, the flag-draped coffin, the military personnel on guard and the six torches. The funerary symbols used in the transfer of Atatrk's coffin from Taut's catafalque to the Ethnographic Museum were not different than the transfer from Istanbul to Ankara.
