Hamamönü & Hacı Bayram

Just downhill from Ankara's citadel, Hamamönü is the piece of Ottoman Ankara that was saved. A quarter of narrow lanes and timber houses — the kind of two- and three-storey wooden mansions that once filled the old town — restored over the last fifteen years into craft workshops, tea gardens, small galleries and cafés. It is named for its bathhouses; the sixteenth-century Karacabey Hamam still stands. Nearby, on a hill used for worship for millennia, the Hacı Bayram Veli Mosque draws a steady stream of pilgrims. The pace is slow and deliberately picturesque. This is heritage-as-neighbourhood rather than heritage-as-museum.