Beytepe & University Campuses

Ankara is a university city as much as a government one, and its campuses form a culture of their own along the southwestern edge of town. Out here — Bilkent, METU, Hacettepe's Beytepe campus — the cultural life runs through concert halls, faculty galleries, campus museums and public lectures rather than commercial spaces. Bilkent, whose name is short for bilim kenti, "city of science," holds one of Turkey's largest art libraries and a serious music-and-performing-arts faculty; METU keeps a science-and-technology museum on its wooded campus. This is culture as the universities produce it: programmed, public, tied to teaching rather than to a market.