The wall is built out of the earlier city.
Anyone who climbs to the Ankara citadel expects to find a fortress. What they find is a catalogue: altars, cornices, capitals and carved blocks from the Roman city, wedged any which way into a wall thrown up in a hurry. The defence was built from the rubble of what it was defending.
01 A second-hand wall
The technical term for this is spolia: reused building material. In Ankara it is not a detail or an anecdote. Scholarly sources describe both circuits — inner and outer — as built "using large quantities of reused masonry". There is no single stretch with a few ancient pieces in it: reuse is the method.
The dates are shakier than one would like. There was fortification on the hill from very early on, with a rebuilding attributed to the Galatians in 278 BC and successive renovations under Roman, Byzantine, Seljuk and Ottoman rule. The complex visible today is placed in or after the seventh century, and both the inner and the outer circuits postdate the Persian capture of the city around 622. The scholar Clive Foss proposed that the inner wall might date from the reign of Constans II; the outer is generally thought to be somewhat later. Nobody gives a closed date, and you should distrust anyone who does.
02 What is actually in the wall
Near the south gate, the best-documented stretch of the circuit, the embedded pieces include altars and herms: carved pedestals and pillars that once stood upright in the lower city, mouldings and garlands and all, now serving as ashlar like any other block. Some are lying down. Some are upside down.
The geometry can also be given in figures. The inner circuit encloses a space of roughly 350 by 150 metres, with closely spaced towers. On the outer circuit the towers stand about forty metres apart. It is a compact fortification, designed to defend a rock rather than a city.
03 The site: 938 metres and a rock
Ankara sits at 938 metres, in the Anatolian interior, between the basins of the Kızılırmak and Sakarya rivers. The historic centre is exactly what its description says: a rocky hill rising some 150 metres above the left bank of the Ankara River, which runs through the city and joins the Sakarya.
That profile explains the name. Ankara comes from the Greek Ánkyra, meaning "anchor", which passed into Latin as Ancyra and into Ottoman Turkish as Engürü. A city a thousand kilometres from the nearest sea has been calling itself anchor for a thousand years.
Today the city has an urban population of 5,293,367 and is Türkiye's second largest. But what organises the landscape is still the same rock: from almost anywhere in the lower city, if you look up, the citadel is there.
04 What is left below
Right at the foot of the hill is the piece that completes the story: the Roman theatre. For years little more than a dip in the ground could be made out north of Hisar Park Caddesi; today the excavated seating is visible, with the stage-building area reasonably clear. It is not a spectacular monument. It is the quarry.
The sequence is easy to reconstruct on the ground and hard to forget once you see it: theatre below, wall above, and between the two a moment of urgency in which somebody decided that well-cut stone was worth more as defence than as spectacle.
05 How to read the city from up there
Go up at the end of the day. Low light rakes across the wall face, and that is when the reused mouldings separate from everything else: they appear as a band of horizontal shadows where before there was only wall. In overhead light you will not see them.
And do not look for an order. What is interesting about the wall is precisely that it has none: nobody composed anything, nobody wanted a garland to sit centred. Each piece is where it fitted. That arbitrariness is the document: it tells you how fast the work went and what was available.
From the highest point you see the plateau opening in every direction, and on a clear day the mountains behind it. You are standing on an anchor, at 938 metres, looking at a dry plain. It is the best half hour the city offers, and it costs nothing.
