Who ruled Ankara?

Ankara occupies a rocky hill and the basin around it on the dry central plateau of Anatolia, in the heart of Turkey. Its citadel hill commanded the junction of roads running across the peninsula, which made it a regional capital in Roman times and a valuable prize for every later power. For most of the past thousand years it was a modest provincial town known for the wool of its long-haired goats, until 1920, when it became the base of the Turkish national movement and then the capital of the new republic.

Bronze Age settlements in the area belonged to the Hattians and then the Hittites, and the town grew in importance under the Phrygians from about the tenth century BCE; later legend named the Phrygian king Midas as its founder. Lydian and Persian rule followed, and then the conquests of Alexander. In 278 BCE Celtic-speaking Galatians crossed into Anatolia, and the Tectosages, one of their tribes, made Ancyra their centre. These invaders were part of the wider world of the Celts, and their language was still heard in the countryside centuries later.

Rome annexed Galatia in 25 BCE under Augustus, and Ancyra became the provincial capital, a busy market where military roads met. A temple to Rome and Augustus was built on the town's height, and on its walls the emperor's own account of his reign, the Res Gestae, was carved in Latin and Greek after his death. It survives there as the most complete copy of the text. In late antiquity Ancyra was an important Christian see that hosted church councils, including one in 314.

The Byzantine Empire held the town through centuries of danger. Persian forces took it in the early seventh century, and Arab armies raided it several times in the seventh to ninth centuries. After the Byzantine defeat at Manzikert in 1071, Turkish forces took Ankara, and over the next two centuries it changed hands among Byzantines, crusaders and Turkish dynasties before settling under the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum. In the fourteenth century it was governed for a time by the Ahi brotherhoods, guilds of craftsmen with religious and civic roles.

The Ottomans under Orhan took Ankara in about 1354. Just outside it, in 1402, Tamerlane crushed the Ottoman army and captured Sultan Bayezid I, but the Ottomans recovered the town within a few years and held it until the end of the Ottoman Empire. Ankara was known in Europe as Angora and lived by trade in mohair, until competition from South African and other producers in the nineteenth century cut into the business. A railway from Istanbul arrived in 1892, but a great fire in 1917 destroyed much of the old town.

After the First World War, with Istanbul under Allied occupation, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk made Ankara his headquarters at the end of 1919. The Grand National Assembly met there on 23 April 1920 and directed the War of Independence from the town, which lay safely beyond the reach of the occupying fleets. On 13 October 1923 Ankara was declared the capital, and the republic was proclaimed two weeks later. The new government built a planned modern city south of the old citadel, laid out by the German planner Hermann Jansen, with ministries, parks and wide boulevards meant to symbolise a break from the Ottoman past. Atatürk's mausoleum, Anıtkabir, was completed in 1953.

Ankara has since grown from a town of a few tens of thousands into Turkey's second-largest city, with more than five million people, and is the seat of government and of many universities.