01 The museum that orders Anatolia
The Museum of Anatolian Civilizations was founded in 1921 as Ankara's first museum and reached its present form in 1968. Its display runs in chronological order, from the Palaeolithic to the Ottoman period, and that is precisely its virtue: it is not a collection of notable pieces, it is a legible sequence.
What it holds, by section: Neolithic material from Çatalhöyük — clay figurines, wall paintings, sculptures; Hittite pieces from Boğazköy, among them bronze tablets, reliefs and seals; the Phrygian assemblage from Gordion, with a reconstructed tomb and its carved and inlaid wooden furniture; and Urartian material from Altıntepe, with architectural elements and ivory ornaments.
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02 The building counts too
The museum occupies two Ottoman buildings in the Atpazarı district, at the foot of the citadel: the Mahmut Paşa bedesten, built between 1464 and 1471, and the Kurşunlu Han. The adaptation was not quick: the restoration and display project for the domed part, by the architect İhsan Kıygı, was carried out between 1938 and 1968.
A fifteenth-century covered market turned into the place that keeps what came before all of it.
03 The field day: Gordion
Gordion is at modern Yassıhüyük, some 70 to 80 kilometres south-west of Ankara, in the Polatlı district. It was the capital of Phrygia and is the type site of that civilisation, continuously occupied from around 2300 BCE to the fourth century CE. UNESCO inscribed it as a World Heritage Site in 2023, at its 45th session, under criterion (iii).
What dominates the landscape is Tumulus MM, popularly known as the "Midas Mound": over fifty metres high today and about three hundred across, built c. 740 BCE. The 1957 excavation found inside a burial with purple and golden textiles in an open log coffin, along with pottery, bronze vessels and wooden furniture.
You can go in. A tunnel leads to the wooden burial chamber, now surrounded by concrete and a metal framework holding it in place. It is a strange experience: you are inside an eighth-century BCE wooden structure, under fifty metres of earth, looking at the beams.
The excavation history deserves a paragraph, because it explains where the objects ended up. The Körte brothers worked there in 1900; the major campaigns were led by Rodney S. Young of the University of Pennsylvania Museum between 1950 and 1973; work continues from 2012 under C. Brian Rose. There is a museum at Yassıhöyük itself, and much of the material is in the Ankara museum and the Istanbul archaeological museums.
04 How to lay out the days
Day one, the museum, all of it and unhurried; it sits at the foot of the citadel, so the climb to the walls fits into the same afternoon. Day two, Gordion: it is a full-day trip by road and worth an early start, especially if you want to go inside the tumulus and see the site museum too. Day three, go back to the Ankara museum. Seriously: after standing at Gordion, the Phrygian cases read differently.
Go in September or October. Those are the two months with the year's best combination of temperature and light in Ankara, and at an open-air site on the plateau that matters more than it would in any city.
If you fit this profile, the argument is short: you will see one of the finest Anatolian collections with no queue, and you will walk into a wooden tomb twenty-eight centuries old. Few cities offer both in three days.
Marat Nadjibaev DushanbeFor the traveler who comes for the capital and stays for the lakes.
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Kok Leng Yeo DiliFor the diver who wants the reef with the most fish on Earth.
Jonashtand Taipei