ABSTRACT
The making of modern Ankara is a momentous yet oft-neglected episode in twentieth-century urban history. The transformation of this ancient Anatolian town into the capital of the Turkish Republic, during the 1920s and 1930s, captured the world’s attention as Ankara became a unique laboratory of modernism and nation building.1 With vestiges of Hittite, Roman and Seljuk civilizations, the town harboured the traces of a former grandeur. Under the Ottoman Empire, it became a thriving centre of the mohair trade, and was the subject of numerous accounts by European travellers from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, when its wealth and status began to wane.2 An impoverished and insalubrious place by the outbreak of the First World War, Ankara suffered further ravage through a major fire in 1916. It should not be too surprising, then, if it did not receive even a passing mention in the survey of Ottoman towns and cities with which, a year later, the British historian Arnold J. Toynbee opened his book Turkey: A Past and a Future.3
