Kızılay

Kızılay is the middle of Ankara — the square, the metro interchange, the crowd of students and civil servants and bookshops and cafés that fills the streets around Atatürk Bulvarı. It is the capital's public living room, and its culture is the kind a great civic centre generates: cultural institutes, exhibition spaces, the shop-window gallery run out of the Goethe-Institut, the bookshops and the meyhanes where the city thinks aloud. This is culture woven into daily life rather than set apart in a gallery quarter — art you meet in the flow of the centre, in institutions and passing shows, as part of the life of the capital's busiest streets.