Experience Ankara like you know someone here.

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.

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.

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.

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.