From Hamamönü to Ulucanlar with Mansions, Museums and a Prison

Right beside Ulus Meydanı, at the head of Atatürk Bulvarı, the five-storey neoclassical building is the work of the Austrian architect Clemens Holzmeister; it went up in 1933-34 as the headquarters of the Emlak ve Eytam Bank. When the bank merged with another in 1946 the building passed to the PTT, was restored and opened in October 2013 as Turkey's first and only stamp museum. Its five floors, 6,500 square metres in all, hold 4,404 original stamps and some 1,500 from countries around the world; the top floor shows stamps from the 189 member states of the Universal Postal Union.

Take the floors from the bottom up. The lower levels tell the history of post and communications and explain how a stamp is printed and used; then come Ottoman stamps and the Republican period. Thematic sections are arranged under cultural heritage, Atatürk, vehicles, sport, nature and tourism; with children the interactive screens and the cinema room make things easier. At the exit there is a counter selling souvenir stamps and a cafeteria.

Even if stamps leave you cold, go in for the building: it is one of Holzmeister's Ankara works and the interior still carries the gravity of a bank headquarters; look at the proportions of the stairs and halls and you will see what kind of institutional voice the capital of the 1930s chose for itself. Confirm opening days and entry conditions from an official source; it may be closed at weekends. On leaving, turn into Anafartalar Caddesi and walk towards the old town; Hamamönü lies southeast of Ulus, within walking distance.

Source: Wikipedia, PTT Pul Müzesi; Wikipedia, Stamp Museum; Kültür Portalı.

Enter the neighbourhood from Talatpaşa Bulvarı and find Sanat Sokağı first; the address is Tanış Sokak in Hacettepe Mahallesi. The twenty-two Ankara houses rebuilt to their original form by the Altındağ municipality have been allocated to artists since 2010, workshops upstairs and galleries below. Painting, ebru marbling, calligraphy, tiles, stained glass, ceramics, leather, felt, silver and jewellery are made and sold here; you may step into any workshop with an open door and watch the master at work, but ask before taking photographs.

Then walk to Kabakçı Konağı. The mansion restored by the municipality hosts the Hamamönü Talks in the evenings, a different subject and guest each night, from literature and music to history and traditional arts. Follow the programme in the municipality's announcements; by day you see the building from outside and from its courtyard. The Kamil Paşa and Beynamlızade mansions belong to the same transformation.

It helps to know the neighbourhood's story as you walk. A conservation board decision in 1997, planning in 1999, street rehabilitation from 2006 starting on İnci and Dutlu streets. Of roughly three hundred buildings, eight are registered monuments and twenty-two listed traditional houses; a good part of the rest was rebuilt in Ankara stone, timber and brick. In 2007 the Yeni Çarşı was demolished to open today's square. Some researchers criticise the result as manufactured nostalgia; visitor reviews call it a place that smells of history. Hear both and look for yourself: the colour of the stone and the wear of the timber tell you which facade is old and which is new.

From here the Intangible Cultural Heritage Museum is a few minutes away; the Taceddin Lodge is at the far end of the neighbourhood, on the Hacettepe side.

Source: Altındağ Belediyesi, Hamamönü Sanat Sokağı; Türkiye Turizm Ansiklopedisi; Wikipedia; Ankara Valiliği; DergiPark (Tekin 2025; Poyraz ve Gündoğan 2014).

The traditional Ankara house on Öz Sokak, off Talatpaşa Bulvarı, is Turkey's first museum of intangible cultural heritage. It was set up in 2013 by the Turkish Folklore Research and Application Centre of Gazi University; the money came from the Ankara Development Agency's 2011 funding programme and the house from the Altındağ municipality, which granted its use free of charge. There are no display cases here, only rooms: workshops for ebru marbling and linden-block printing, a corner for shadow and puppet theatre, a tale room where a storyteller mother tells folk tales, a bridal room where wedding and birth customs are explained and lullabies sung, a conversation room where the storyteller sits, and a play room for mangala and five stones. Karagöz, meddah storytelling, orta oyunu and village plays are part of the programme, and Ankara tales, folk songs and rhymes drift between the rooms.

The museum's largest audience is primary school groups, so on weekday mornings you may overlap with guided classes. That is no bad thing, since the museum lives by being told, and children's questions are the best guide. For the adult traveller the best hour is the afternoon. Learn to play mangala here, look at the marbling tray, listen to the words of a lullaby; it is all over quickly, but it makes a good break after the streets of Hamamönü.

Call the museum for open days and hours; entry conditions can change. It is small and forty-five minutes is enough. On leaving, follow Talatpaşa Bulvarı and turn into Taçlı Sokak; the Taceddin Sultan Mosque and lodge are there.

Source: Kültür Portalı; Ankara Kalkınma Ajansı; Wikipedia.

On the edge of the Hacettepe campus, on Taçlı Sokak, a mosque, a tomb, a small cemetery and a two-storey timber house make up the Taceddin Lodge. It was founded in the mid-seventeenth century by the Celveti sheikh Taceddinzade Mustafa Efendi, thought to have come from the circle of Aziz Mahmud Hüdayi. The first buildings were of mud brick and timber; when they decayed, Abdülhamid II allocated more than sixty thousand kuruş from the privy purse, and the mosque, minaret and tomb were rebuilt between 1892 and 1901, the inscription giving the year 1319 (1901). The rectangular cut-stone mosque and the tomb of red andesite are still in use for worship; the complex was restored again in 1988 and 2008.

The real story is in the guest wing. Mehmet Akif Ersoy, deputy for Burdur, lived from May 1920 to May 1921 in the selamlık set aside for him at the lodge; here he wrote the sixth book of Safahat and the national anthem. The house was turned into a museum by a city council decision of 1949 but stood neglected for years; it was repaired in 1982 and opened to visitors in 1984. The rooms are plain and the objects few; what matters is the place itself.

A few steps from the lodge, at 47 Sarıkadı Sokak, is the Mehmet Akif Ersoy Literature Museum Library. It opened on 12 March 2011, the ninetieth anniversary of the anthem's adoption, as Turkey's first literature museum library. The two-storey building in the style of an old Ankara house holds some seven thousand books, close to a hundred periodicals and the poet's pocket watch, spectacles, prayer beads and face cast; upstairs are the Ankara City Library and a meeting room with a traditional Ankara ceiling. Shelves are open and you may sit and read. Closed on Mondays; check the site for weekends.

Enter the mosque outside prayer times, take off your shoes, cover shoulders and knees, keep quiet. The tomb and cemetery are part of the mosque and need no separate visit.

Source: TDV İslam Ansiklopedisi, Taceddin Dergahı maddesi; Wikipedia; Kültür Portalı; ahtem.kutuphane.gov.tr.

The stone-walled building at 63 Ulucanlar Caddesi opened as a prison in 1925 and served as Ankara's central prison for eighty-one years. It closed in 2006 when the inmates were moved to the new prison at Sincan, passed to the Altındağ municipality in 2009 and opened in June 2011 as a museum and cultural centre, presented as a memory of eighty-one years. It has since received more than a million visitors.

The wards are the backbone of the visit. Wards nine and ten were the section inmates called the Hilton; ward four and the isolation cells have been arranged as they were, with twenty-two wax figures; wards five and six hold the biographies of the journalists, writers, poets and politicians held here, personal belongings collected from their families and photographs taken inside. The bath, the library and the conference hall are also on the route. The gallows in the courtyard is the heaviest place in the museum: nineteen people were executed here. Pass through in silence, be sparing with the camera, and know that it is not suitable for small children.

The museum does not argue, it shows: the size of the cells, the bunks, the writing on the walls, the letters. It tells you not who was right but how people lived here; visit it in that spirit. When you step into the courtyard, stop for a minute; just outside the prison wall the evening traffic and the life of the neighbourhood go on, and that contrast is half of what the museum has to say.

Confirm open days and hours on the municipality's page. On leaving you can walk down Ulucanlar Caddesi to Cebeci, where the Kurtuluş and Dikimevi stations of the Ankaray are; if you are tired, go back the same way to Hamamönü and catch a bus on Talatpaşa Bulvarı.

Source: Altındağ Belediyesi; Kültür Portalı; Wikipedia; Wikipedia, Ulucanlar Prison Museum.