Ankara: Turkey's Capital City
In July, at the end of the school year, some ladies from my department and I went to Ankara for an ESL teaching conference. We spent most of the time on the Bilkent campus, but we did get to use one day for sightseeing. Anaka is a much, much smaller city than Istanbul and is very different. Ankara is much quieter and much less edgy than Istanbul. Instead of high rise concrete buildings, Ankara's buildings are much more influenced by Anatolian style architecture.
Ankara's most impressive feature is the Anatolian Museum of Civilization, where Turkey stores it's amazing wealth of national treasures dating from the Paleolithic period to the Byzantine era. It is here that I began to fully understand the real depth and breadth of Turkish history and how is really is a crossroads for East and West (and other cultures). One of my favorite pieces was the cave paintings from Çatalhöyük-- the oldest known prehistoric cave paintings. Çatalhöyük is the site of the first known attempt of humankind at recording history. This sculpture above is from the Çatalhöyük; she is, Cybele, the mother goddess.
The museum's collection of
Hittite reliefs (pictured below) and sculptures is truly incredible--an entire room.
The museum even has a reproduction of King Midas's tomb.
The rest are just pictures of things I found interesting.
Two boys playing
tavla (backgammon)--a favorite pastime of most Turkish men.
An antique store display and bags of hena used in wedding ceremonies.
After a long year, my family and I were reunited in the city of the Ottomans. For one day, we sent the boys off for a transportation adventure and the ladies stayed behind for a lesson in Turkish cooking. We spent the morning chopping and dicing (which is much faster with a big knife, as Carey learned) and our efforts ended in a beautiful 5 course meal. We made some typical Turkish dishes such as
lentil soup (my personal favorite) and zucchini pancakes. We also made "fainting imam"; this dish is a stuffed eggplant with a lot of oil and a story. The story goes that a stingy imam was watching his wife cook and saw how much of the precious and expensive olive oil she put into the eggplant dish and he fainted! At the end of the meal we undid out top pants button and waddled back to the hotel for a rest before more sightseeing. 
