Experience Ankara like you know someone here.

One for a proper night out in the embassy quarter, one for cheap plates and cafés with the Bahçelievler students — learn both and you've learned how the city eats.

A döner that isn't the döner you know, lamb baked on orzo, a simit that isn't Istanbul's — the small, stubborn cuisine of a city people say has none.

Kızılay's pedestrian strip — fried anchovies and a cold Efes on a plastic stool, kokoreç at midnight, and the loudest, youngest crowd in the capital.

The capital's polite side — a shopping avenue, swans in a park, and a side street that turns into Ankara's bar strip after dark.

The republic's founder under a limestone colonnade on a hill over the city — the one place in Ankara that every Turk visits, and the reason to walk slowly.

Hittites in a fifteenth-century bedesten, coppersmiths on the hill below, and the whole city from a Byzantine wall — Ankara's oldest corner in one afternoon.

Where the republic was declared, where Augustus carved his own obituary, and where Ankara still comes to pray — all within ten minutes' walk.

A restored Ottoman quarter below the citadel — konaks turned into tea gardens, a bath from 1440, and the house where the national anthem was written.

The model farm Atatürk founded on bare steppe in 1925 — a replica of his Salonica house, the old brewery, and now a huge new nature park on the same land.

A reed-fringed lake inside a university's own forest, free on foot, with a loop track that Ankara runs, cycles and walks its dogs around every weekend.

Ankara's other lake — a long lakeside park, kites, breakfast places and birds — and an honest word about the drought.

A hill town of three thousand timber houses ninety minutes west — meat and vegetables baked in clay, eighty-layer baklava, and a carrot on every corner.

Hot mineral water and a black-pine national park an hour north — Ankara's answer to a cold weekend.

The Presidential Symphony, the State Opera and Ballet and the State Theatres all live here — world-class programmes at prices that would be a joke in Istanbul.

A real winter — dry cold, blue skies, snow on the citadel — and a hill twenty-five kilometres out where the city goes to slide.