Ulus & Citadel

Ulus is where Ankara stops being a modern capital and becomes an old Anatolian town. The citadel crowns the hill — walls the Galatians raised, the Romans repaired, the Byzantines rebuilt and the Ottomans restored, with wooden houses still crowded inside them. At the foot of the castle, in two restored Ottoman hans — a covered bazaar and a caravanserai — sits the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, which holds the deep history of the whole peninsula in one building. A few streets away a Roman temple stands against a fifteenth-century mosque, sharing a wall. This is the layered core: Bronze Age, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, all within a walk.