Ancient History and Roman Ruins in Ankara

Ankara, Turkey

By the Travel Wiki editorial team

Walk through layers of empire at the Ankara Castle and Roman remains

Climb the cobbled streets toward Ankara Castle and you move through two thousand years at once. The volcanic outcrop rising above the old city has sheltered fortifications since the Phrygians of the 8th century BC, then the Galatians and Romans who reinforced it. You can walk the double walls, climb one of the towers, and look out over the sprawling city and distant mountains—the same view that Roman administrators, Ottoman governors, and Turkish nationalists have watched. The castle is free to explore, open daily from 10:00 to 20:00.

Below the castle, the Roman Theatre sits with its scrappy remains of stage and backstage—unrestored seating, but enough to sense the scale of ancient Ancyra. Walk north to the Column of Julianus, a 15-meter column erected in 362 CE to mark the visit of the Roman Emperor Julian, who stopped in town on his way to Persia. Nearby stands the Temple of Augustus (Monumentum Ancyranum), where only the side walls and ornate doorway remain from the 1st-century sanctuary built to honor the emperor Octavian. The Romans also left behind the Roman Baths, a large bath complex built under Emperor Caracalla around 200 AD, with its classical sequence of cold, warm, and hot rooms still visible.

Medieval mosques and the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations

The Arslanhane Mosque, built in 1290 in Seljuk style and repaired in 1330, rewards the hike up the hill with a finely carved interior where a forest of wooden columns supports the ceiling. In 2023 it was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List as one of five wooden mosques in Central Anatolia. Nearby, the Ahielvan Mosque from the late 14th and early 15th centuries holds a richly carved walnut pulpit. Deeper in the old city, the Sultan Alaeddin Mosque—the oldest in the city, built in 1178—still bears its walnut pulpit with an inscription marking its age. The Hacı Bayram Mosque, built in 1428 and restored by the architect Sinan in the 16th century, has an ornate tomb of Hacı Bayram Veli, a poet and Sufi teacher who draws pilgrims.

To understand what these buildings contained and worshipped, spend time at the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, 800 meters east of Ulus. Its excellent displays range from prehistory through the proto-Greek and Roman eras, with statues, bas-reliefs, and inscriptions recovered from sites across the region. The museum opens daily from 08:30 to 17:30; adult entry is 80 TL.

Specialized museums in restored historic buildings

The Koç Museum occupies Çengel Han, a caravanserai built in 1523, and displays the collection of Rahmi M Koç, the businessman behind the Kâmil Koç bus company. Inside you'll find exhibits on transport, communication, and science from the 1850s onward—a smaller version of his Istanbul museum. It opens Tuesday–Thursday 10:00–17:00, Saturday–Sunday 10:00–19:00; adult entry is 625 TL.

The Chess Museum holds more chess sets than you would expect—ancient and modern variants, including three-sided versions—in a modest space off Ulucanlar Caddesi. It opens Tuesday–Sunday 10:00–18:00 for 15 TL. The Ulucanlar Prison Museum, opened in 2011, occupies a former barracks converted to a prison in 1925 that held almost 800 inmates in semi-open and maximum security wings. It became a notorious site of political repression where 19 people were hanged; the museum documents its history through Tuesday–Sunday 10:00–16:00 for 60 TL. The Turk-Russian Friendship House, a bright modern art gallery just below the castle, displays Belarusian and Ukrainian sections alongside Russian art and books at very low prices; it opens daily 10:00–17:00, with an entrance fee of about 20 TL (though the staff sometimes waive it for visitors who don't understand Turkish).

Ottoman mosques and republican monuments in Ulus

The Victory Monument in Ulus Square, erected in 1927, shows Atatürk on horseback in marble and bronze—one of the few republican monuments inscribed in Ottoman Turkish using Arabic script, since it predates the alphabet reform by a year. The Museum of the War of Independence, housed in the first site of the Turkish Republican Parliament (1920–1924), occupies the building from which the 1921–22 War of Independence was directed. Inside are photographs and memorabilia from that period; it opens daily 09:00–17:00. The Cenâbî Ahmet Paşa Mosque, built by the celebrated architect Sinan in 1566, displays finely crafted Ankara stone with a white marble pulpit and prayer niche. The Molla Great Mosque, built around 1500, is modest in scale despite its name.

Beneath modern Ulus lies the Cardo Maximus, a Roman road 216 meters long and 7 meters wide discovered in 1995. Its artifacts now rest in the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, but the roadbed itself marks where Roman soldiers, merchants, and emperors once traveled through the junction of north–south and east–west trade routes that made Ankara strategically vital to Rome's eastern frontier.

Small collections that reveal hidden passions

Not every museum in Ankara occupies a grand building. The Kelime Museum, opposite the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, is a small private art museum where signage appears only in Turkish—a signal that you are stepping into a passionate collector's world rather than an official institution. The PTT Post Museum and Vakif Museum, both near Ulus, hold displays of stamps and postal memorabilia in one case, and antique Turkish carpets, candle holders, Korans, watches, and woodworks in the other—the latter housed in a 1927 building that once served as a law school. The Aviation Association Museum, 200 meters northwest of the railway station, showcases aircraft and a parachute training tower. All these smaller venues are free or cost only a few lira, and they offer a different rhythm from major museums: the chance to linger with objects that mattered to someone.

Ankara's layers—Roman capital, Celtic stronghold, Ottoman provincial town, republican seat of power—reveal themselves in a single afternoon of walking. The castle offers views and free entry; the museums reward deep attention with details that no guidebook can capture. Begin with the castle at dawn, descend through Ottoman Ulus to the Roman monuments, then move inward to the smaller collections where you'll find the city's particular obsessions. The Museum of Anatolian Civilizations deserves a full morning; everything else can be visited in snippets as you wander the cobbled streets and discover which mosque or monument calls you to stop.

Sources

  1. Ankara
  2. Wikivoyage: Ankara

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