The capital of the Turkish Republic, Ankara was once called Angora. The fine, soft hair on Angora goats became an industry which still thrives.
It was the Hittites who named this place Ankuwash before 1200 BC. The town prospered because it was at the intersection of the north-south and east-west trade routes. After the Hittites, it was a Phrygian town, then taken by Alexander, claimed by the Seleucids and finally occupied by the Galatians who invaded Anatolia around 250 BC. Augustus Ceasar annexed it to Rome in 25 BC as Ankyra.
The Byzantines held the town for centuries, with intermittent raids by the Persians and Arabs. When the Seljuk Turks came to Anatolia after 1071, they made the town into a Seljuk city but held it with difficulty.
Ottoman possesion of Angora did not go well, for it was near here that Sultan Yidirim Beyazit was captured by Tamerlane - the sultan later died in captivity. After the Timurid state collapsed and the Ottoman civil war ended, Angora became merely a quiet town where long-haired goats were raised.
Modern Ankara is a planned city. When Ataturk set up his provisional government here in 1920, it was a small, dusty Anatolian town of some 30,000 people, with a strategic position in the heart of the country. After his victory in the War of Independence, Ataturk declared this the new capital of the country (October, 1923), and set about developing it. European urban planners were consulted, and the result was a city of long, wide boulevards, a forested park with an artificial lake, and numerous residential and diplomatic neighborhoods.
For republican Turks, Istanbul is their glorious historical city, still the center of their business and finance, but Ankara is their true capital, built on the ashes of the empire with blood and sweat.
--Lonely Planet guide to Turkey
