After my first few days in Ankara, I posted on Facebook that I had never encountered people who were kinder or more helpful to strangers than the citizens of this otherwise distinctly unattractive capital.
That’s a big generalisation, and one friend commented that this was no big deal. People across the world, she said, are helpful to you if you are friendly and respectful to them. I’m not sure that’s true.
I have been lucky enough to make many lifelong friends in the Basque Country and in Italy's Cinque Terre, but in both cases it was hard work initially. Many Basques and Ligurians characteristically are, to put it tactfully, reserved when approached by foreigners.
After two full weeks working in Ankara, I found my first impressions confirmed, by my experience and that of colleague attending a UN conference on restoring the world’s degraded lands. We all agreed that not only people in the service industries, but anyone we bumped into on the street, went out of their way to welcome strangers.
This warmth was all the more remarkable given the city's creaking infrastructure, overcrowding and often brutally ugly architecture and streetscapes. Ankara is an ancient city at the centre of Anatolia, one of the cradles of human civilisation. But as capital of Turkey, it dates back only to 1921, when Kemal Atatürkk made it the bastion of his successful resistance to the Allied attempt to dismember the country after the first World War.
Since then, its population has grown from 35,000 to more than five million. Myriad indistinguishable streets have sprawled higgledy-piggledy across its hilly terrain. Almost everywhere, a jungle of garish neon and plastic signs bewilders and exhausts the eye. Flashy high-rise malls and apartments contrast with tracts of dire and squalid poverty.
Patches of respite
Ankara’s mayor extolled the city’s new “green” strategy to the conference attendees, and indeed many new small parks offer patches of respite from crowds and traffic noise. But those I visited were mostly dusty and poorly designed.
They were also disturbingly devoid of birds. Many world capitals, including Dublin and New York, are meccas for bird lovers. But in Ankara I saw only feral pigeons and magpies, two jackdaws, and a single tiny flock of sparrows.
This seems especially odd and depressing in Turkey, with its wealth of biodiversity historically as the point where vast migration patterns from three continents intersect.
All these problems seem paltry, of course, compared to the horrific bombings that killed more than 100 people at a demonstration for a peaceful resolution of the long-running Kurdish-Turkish conflict, on our first day in the city. They were a brutal reminder of the deep fractures that lie beneath the friendly surface of Ankara, and of Turkey's proximity to the conflict in Syria and the misery of the Middle East and Africa.
While the government pinned the attacks on Islamic State, some opposition parties and Kurdish nationalists blamed “dark forces” within Turkey’s security forces. They also argued the ruling AKP party, which espouses a tough, not to say brutal, line on law and order, stood to gain in the subsequent elections, which it won handsomely, from revulsion at the bombings.
Good humour
Yet despite this context of violence and distrust, the city authorities did not respond to the attacks with a heavy-handed lockdown. Many citizens thronged the city streets in apparent good humour just hours later. Perhaps Turkey has absorbed so many terrible shocks in its history that it comes naturally to keep calm and carry on in such grim circumstances.
Ankara’s Museum of Anatolian Civilisation provides a welcome opportunity to reflect on that history. There can be very few other places where you can observe the evolution of a culture from the early Stone Age to the Roman era, based entirely on the abundance of artifacts and art from a single compact region.
One of the most fascinating sections is devoted to Catalhoyuk, one of the very first large human settlements on record. The thousands of residents lived in spacious, well-designed houses. Their miniature sculpture evokes appreciation of beauty, celebration of the body and sexual tenderness.
According to a recent BBC documentary, The Ascent of Woman, its citizens enjoyed both social and gender equality. Ankara, and Dublin for that matter, could learn a lot from Catalhoyuk.
