Ulus

Disclaimer: I’m sorry if I ever repeat myself in this blog. I write it at home, where I don’t have an internet connection, so I don’t have access to past entries and I might say the same things twice.

Ulus (“Nation”) is the old district of Ankara, situated between the suburbs where most of us live (I live in Subayevleri, “Officers’ houses;” most of the kids in the program live farther out in Batıkent, “West City”) and the downtown district, Kızılay (“Red Moon”). The main thoroughfare in Ankara, which is obviously Atatürk Boulevard, runs north to south from the suburbs through Ulus and Kızılay to Çankaya (specifically Kavaklıdere, “Poplar Creek,” a somewhat swanky neighborhood with several embassies), where we have class. This is basically the extent of my knowledge of Ankara, since it’s what I see every day.

Ankara Kalesi, which I know I’ve mentioned before, is in Ulus. It’s interesting for several reasons. First, the walls are really old, and the people who built them used whatever stones they could find, including ones with statues stuck in them or Greek or Roman writing on them. Neat!



Second, it’s one of the only real slums in Ankara (Istanbul has lots more, I’ve been assured). Not neat, but interesting! People live both inside the fortress’s walls and in the surrounding area. I did feel pretty uncomfortable being in a large group of American tourists walking through people’s neighborhoods snapping pictures, though.



Third, it has great views of the city! (The view of the city in this picture isn't that great, but you can imagine that the people in the picture had a really nice view.)



After the kale we walked around the area, went to a kuruyemiş (dried fruit, nuts and seeds, or “anything you’d find in trail mix” as one student put it) market, walked around a kervansaray (caravansaray, a rest stop/trading post on the Silk Road), wandered through antiques shops, had gözleme for lunch (filled crepes), and eventually made it to the heart of Ulus, where there is a bazaar. They were selling fish. Dead fish staring at me + sunburn + not enough to drink meant that I was pretty much at my limit with Ulus at that point, and happy that we spent only about two minutes in the bazaar with the dead, staring fish and then hopped on a bus and went back to school.
Another rambling side note: I find that Turkey is dangerous for me in the sense that they produce attractive consumer goods. One nice thing (for me) about Russia was that the revolution disrupted material links with the past (“traditional” forms of craft were politicized or lost, etc.), plus the Soviet economy was not very consumer goods-oriented. The upshot of this is that even today in Russia there is very little that I really want to buy. You can only have so many nesting dolls. (Actually, I’ve never purchased a nesting doll. At least not for myself. Fun fact.) But in Turkey there are ALL SORTS of things I want to buy, like jewelry and scarves and Turkish tea cups and Turkish ceramics and Turkish rugs and Ottoman maps of the Russian Empire (I searched forever for an old map of the Russian Empire in Russia, and never ever found one… unfortunately, I think the Ottoman one I saw today is a bit out of my price range). And hookahs. Okay, I’m probably past the stage in my life where I feel the need to own my own hookah, but still. Also, unlike Russia, which imports most of its consumer goods (preferring to run its economy on raw materials exports), Turkey makes things. Particularly textiles, which means there’s plenty of cheap, decent quality clothing here. Yikes. I’m glad I’m not spending two years here, or I’d have serious budget and closet-space issues.

To make a long story short, we saw a lot of things I could have happily bought in Ulus, but I didn’t buy anything except a couple of refrigerator magnets for the fridge magnet connoisseurs in my life. But if I have a lot of stipend money left over at the end of the trip and I don’t end up going to Georgia (the one with khachapuri, not the one with peaches), watch out, I may come home with some sort of strange Turkish musical instrument or an antique Ottoman chandelier or something similarly ridiculous. Or just thirty or forty scarves.