Ankara

Ankara is about as European as Turkey gets. There are touches of the mystical east if you know where to look but the vast majority of the city is 20th century through and through. Ankara is a huge university town and you'll find the streets of Kizilay and the bars of Sakarya thronged with students for most of the year.

Apart from the old town in and around the citadel near Ulus, and unplanned shantytown neighbourhoods here and there built hastily by new immigrants from countryside in the last five decades, most of Ankara, which was a provincial town of 20,000 people in the early days of Republic, is a purpose-built capital due to its strategic location at the heart of the country, although the history of settlement in the vicinity is millenia old.