A Poor City, Ankara
A Republic in the Middle of the Steppe: The Capital's Class History, from the Ottoman Years to Liberation, from the Exiles to the Gecekondu
A Poor City, Ankara
A Republic in the Middle of the Steppe: The Capital's Class History, from the Ottoman Years to Liberation, from the Exiles to the Gecekondu
Dear young comrades,
Today is 13 October. On this day in 1923 the Grand National Assembly of Turkey passed a law of a single article: "The seat of administration of the State of Turkey is the city of Ankara." One hundred and three years ago a steppe town whose population did not reach thirty thousand, half of it ash from a great fire six years earlier, famous for its malaria and its dust, became the capital of a state.
In this article I will tell the story of that town. First briefly, then at length.
Summary: Ankara in one paragraph
In the last century of the Ottoman Empire, Anatolia was the empire's store of soldiers and taxes; Ankara too was a provincial town that had grown poor, its mohair cloth beaten by English fabric. The War of Liberation carried this town to the centre: Istanbul was under occupation, the palace had come to terms with the occupier; Ankara, at the end of the railway, close to the front but out of reach, was the headquarters of a new power that rested on Anatolia's peasant soldier and its notables. Its proclamation as capital on 13 October 1923 was not only a geographical choice. It was the symbol of a break with the palace, with the capitulations, and with the Levantine commercial bourgeoisie. Over the next twenty years Ankara was turned into a city of enlightenment by the hands of German and Austrian scientists, architects and musicians fleeing Nazism: the conservatory, the Faculty of Language, History and Geography, the Higher Institute of Agriculture, the People's Houses, the Hasanoğlan Higher Village Institute. But this enlightenment came from above, and class drew its limit: in 1948 the left-wing lecturers were dismissed from the faculty, the Village Institutes were closed, and the land was not given to the peasant. Beside the planned Ankara, from the 1950s on, the other Ankara grew, put up overnight by labourers torn from the village: the gecekondus of Altındağ, of Hıdırlıktepe, of Mamak, of Keçiören. In 1988 Zeki Ökten's Düttürü Dünya carried that Ankara to the screen, through the eyes of a gecekondu family whose plot, after an amnesty on unlicensed building, was sold to a contractor. Today the same hills are an urban-transformation site; indebted title-holding takes the place of the gecekondu, and the block estate takes the place of neighbourliness. While the gate of Ostim and of Siteler, which once took the gecekondu's child in as an apprentice, narrows, a part of that youth is pushed onto the "easy road" of drugs, of prostitution and of the gang; this is not a moral collapse, it is the lumpenisation of a class. The thesis of this article is this: Ankara is slighted as a city of civil servants, a city of the state; yet Ankara is the city of Turkey's public reason, of its public worker, of its student and of its gecekondu labourer. To stand by Ankara is to stand by the public's Ankara, against the state's Ankara.
Now let us come to the detail.
First let us speak like someone from Ankara
The sentences of those who have never loved Ankara are ready-made, and you have all heard them: "Ankara has no sea." "There is nothing to do in Ankara." "A grey city of civil servants." "The most beautiful place in Ankara is the bus back to Istanbul."
Someone who has lived in Ankara smiles at these sentences, because they know.
Ankara has no sea. That is true. But Ankara has its dry cold: that dry cold which, walking from Kızılay to Kuğulu in November, cuts your face and draws you closer to one another. Ankara has its steppe: that bare, honest view which, looking from Hıdırlıktepe or from the Citadel at sunset, runs to the horizon and reminds you where the city came from. Ankara has its public worker waiting for a minibus in Kızılay at six in the morning, its student browsing books at noon in the second-hand shops of Olgunlar Street, its trade unionist sitting down at a table on Sakarya Avenue in the evening, its musician playing the clarinet in Ulus at night.
To the one who says "there is nothing to do in Ankara", I ask: did you never wait for someone in front of the old Dost bookshop in Kızılay? After a film at Akün, or at Kavaklıdere Cinema, did you never walk to Tunalı? At the Ankara Art Theatre, at AST, after a Brecht play, did you never leave the hall and go on arguing on the pavement? Did you never sit in the very back row of the Grand Theatre, or of the Şinasi Stage, on a student ticket? By the pool in the Youth Park, throwing simit to the swans at Kuğulu, did you never stop in front of a petition table on Yüksel Avenue? Did you never see a spring festival in the forest of METU, in Cebeci, in Beşevler? Passing under the Emek office block, did you never join a rally in Güvenpark?
Ankara's entertainment may be thin; but Ankara's public life is denser than in any other city of this country. Because Ankara was founded not as a city of entertainment, but as a city of work and of ideas. This article is also, a little, an answer to those who slight that city.
The folk song does not say it for nothing: "Look at Ankara's stone, look at the tears in my eyes." There is labour in this city's stone, and in its years. Let us now begin the story of that labour.
Anatolia under the Ottomans: a store of soldiers and taxes
To understand Ankara one must first understand Anatolia; and to understand Anatolia, how the Ottoman Empire used it.
In the classical Ottoman order the land belonged to the sultan; the peasant worked it, and gave a part of the crop to the holder of the timar, then, increasingly from the seventeenth century, to the holder of the iltizam, that is, to the tax farmer who paid the tax in advance and collected more than that from the peasant. In this system the Anatolian peasant had two duties: to pay tax, and to be a soldier. From the Celali rebellions to the uprisings of the nineteenth century, the history of Anatolia is in large part the history of the peasant crushed under these two burdens.
The nineteenth century made the burden heavier. The 1838 Treaty of Balta Liman opened the doors to English goods; local craft could not compete with cheap factory goods. The foreign debts taken on after 1854 could not be paid; the Ottoman Public Debt Administration, the Düyun-u Umumiye, set up by the Muharrem Decree of 1881, that is, the debt administration run by European creditors, seized the empire's most profitable revenues, from salt to silk, from tobacco to stamps. Railways were built for foreign capital with a "kilometre guarantee", that is, with concessions under which the state would pay the difference if they did not make a profit. In short, the Ottoman Empire turned into a country that looked politically independent but was economically a semi-colony of European capital. The instrument of this semi-colonisation was the Levantine and non-Muslim commercial bourgeoisie in Istanbul and in Izmir; the one who paid the price was the Anatolian peasant.
The town of mohair
Ankara is a small but instructive example of this picture. For centuries Ankara was the city of the Angora goat, that is, of the "Angora goat" famous for its fine and lustrous fleece. The sof woven from this fleece was a valuable cloth exported to Europe; this is why Ankara was once a lively city of craftspeople and merchants.
In the nineteenth century two things happened. First, English factory cloth wiped sof from the market. Second, Angora goats were taken to South Africa and to America and began to be raised there; Ankara lost its monopoly in the raw material as well. The city of craftspeople fell back into a poor provincial town exporting raw mohair. There is a local example here of what Marx wrote on colonialism: being tied to the world market does not grow industry in the peripheral country. It reduces it to a producer of raw material.
In 1892 the Anatolian Railway, built with German capital, reached Ankara. The railway carried grain and mohair to the port; it brought the town a little life, but it did not change its fate. In 1917 a great fire burned a large part of the city. At the end of the First World War Ankara was a town of between twenty and thirty thousand people, half of it burnt, its marshes giving off malaria.
History, then, chose that town.
The War of Liberation: the town's march to the centre
After the Armistice of Mudros in 1918 the empire was broken up. Izmir was left to the Greek army, the south to French and Italian forces. On 16 March 1920 Istanbul was formally occupied; the Chamber of Deputies was raided, and deputies were arrested and exiled to Malta. The palace and the Sublime Porte chose to compromise with the occupier; it was this power that would put its signature to Sèvres.
The resistance was organised in Anatolia. After the congresses of Erzurum and Sivas, the Representative Committee arrived in Ankara on 27 December 1919. On 23 April 1920 the Grand National Assembly of Turkey opened in Ankara, in the old Committee of Union and Progress club building in Ulus. Look today at the benches of that building: they are like school desks. A state was founded on a school desk.
Why was it won?
The class composition of the War of Liberation has to be seen correctly, because both the romantic account and the official account hide it.
The Anatolian peasant carried the military burden of the war; the women who carried ammunition by ox-cart, and the privates who died at Sakarya, were that peasant. The political and financial leadership was taken on by the soldier-bureaucrat cadres together with the Anatolian notables, the landowners and the local merchants. The common enemy of this alliance was the occupier and his local partners, that is, the palace and the comprador commercial bourgeoisie.
On the international plane, the most important support of the liberation was Soviet Russia. By the Treaty of Moscow of 16 March 1921 the Soviets became one of the first great states to recognise the Ankara government; aid in gold, arms and ammunition reached Anatolia by way of the Black Sea. This meeting of a national liberation struggle against imperialism with the world's first socialist revolution was the practical counterpart of Lenin's thesis on the "oppressed nations".
Between 23 August and 13 September 1921, at Sakarya, at Ankara's gate, the turning point of the war was lived. The Greek army came as far as Polatlı; the sound of the guns was heard in the city. Ankara did not fall.
The contradiction inside the liberation
But the limits of this alliance were also plain while the war was still going on. The left-wing currents founded in Ankara in 1920, and echoed in the Assembly, were liquidated in a short time; in January 1921 Mustafa Suphi and his comrades were killed in the Black Sea, off Trabzon. The leadership of the new state was taking Soviet aid on the one hand, and on the other was not permitting an independent workers' and peasants' movement at home.
This contradiction also determined the character of the republic that would be founded: a national bourgeois revolution that had won its independence against imperialism, that had brought down the sultanate, but that did not touch the property order, did not give land to the peasant, and did not recognise the worker's right to a union. Ankara would be the capital of both the progressive and the limited face of this revolution.
13 October 1923: why Ankara?
After the war was won, the question was plain: where would the capital be? Istanbul had been the heart of the empire for centuries; all the institutions, the embassies, the capital, the press were there. Ankara was a town of dust, mud, malaria, and almost no buildings. The embassies mocked this decision; some diplomats preferred for years to go back and forth by train from Istanbul to Ankara.
Even so, on 13 October 1923 the motion put by İsmet Pasha and his comrades was accepted in the Assembly. Sixteen days later, on 29 October, the Republic was proclaimed. The order matters: first the capital, then the republic. The place of the capital was a prior decision about the character of the regime that would be founded.
Let us set the reasons side by side:
| What was Istanbul? | What was Ankara? |
|---|---|
| The centre of the sultanate and the caliphate | The centre of the break with the sultanate |
| The city of a power that had remained under occupation and compromised with the occupier | The city of the Assembly founded against the occupation |
| Open to the sea, under the guns of warships | In the middle of the steppe, in strategic depth |
| The city of the Levantine and non-Muslim commercial bourgeoisie, of the capitulations, of the Public Debt Administration | The city of the Anatolian notables and of the new bureaucracy |
| The city of the embassies, the foreign banks, capital | The city where there was nothing, and where everything would be built again |
| The capital of the past | The building site of the future |
The opposition in this table is real, but let us read its class meaning correctly. The choice of Ankara was not a choice against capital itself, but against a form of capital dependent on foreign capital. The aim of the new republic was not to abolish capitalism, but to create a "national" bourgeoisie; Ankara would be the headquarters of the bureaucracy that would raise this bourgeoisie by the hand of the state. The banks, the state factories and the railways founded in the Ankara of the 1920s and 1930s were parts of this project.
But let us also say one thing and give it its due: to found a capital in the middle of the steppe, where there was nothing, was a revolutionary audacity. Ankara was a people's way of saying "we can do it too". This audacity is the most valuable legacy Ankara still carries today.
Founding a city on the steppe
The first task of Ankara, once proclaimed capital, was to found itself. There was no water; the marshes were drained, and the Çubuk Dam was built. There were no houses; civil servants lived for years in inn rooms and rented rooms. There were no trees; the Atatürk Forest Farm became one of the first green spaces founded on the steppe.
The first development plan was commissioned from Carl Christoph Lörcher in 1924–1925. The plan that really decided things is that of the German urbanist Hermann Jansen, who won the international competition opened in 1928; it was approved in 1932. Jansen's Ankara was founded on an axis between the old city, Ulus, and the new administrative city, Yenişehir. Atatürk Boulevard was the spine of this axis; Kızılay became its heart. The Austrian architect Clemens Holzmeister designed the Ministries, the General Staff, and the present Assembly building.
Jansen's plan had calculated the city for 300,000 people in 50 years. This number was already passed in the 1950s. Today Ankara is a city of about 6 million.
Inside the plan, from the very beginning, there was a class line. Yenişehir was planned for bureaucrats, officers and the new middle class: wide avenues, houses with gardens, apartment blocks. The surroundings of Ulus and of the Citadel were left to the old people of Ankara, to the shopkeepers, to the workers who came to work on the building of the city. For the workers who built the city, neither housing nor a neighbourhood was planned. They would found their own neighbourhoods themselves, outside the plan. We will come back to this line in a moment; because Ankara's real story was written on the other side of that line.
The Ankara of those fleeing the war in Europe
In 1933 Hitler came to power in Germany. Within a few months thousands of scientists, artists and teachers, of Jewish origin, socialist, liberal, or simply unwilling to bow to the regime, were dismissed from universities, orchestras and theatres. In the same year in Turkey the Istanbul Darülfünun was closed and Istanbul University was founded in its place. The two developments were tied together: Turkey invited hundreds of the academics whom Nazism had driven out.
An important part of these exiles came to Ankara. And they founded Ankara again, in the true sense of the word. Let us name a few.
Ernst Reuter. A politician who had served as general secretary of the Communist Party of Germany in 1921, then passed to the Social Democratic Party, and, while mayor of Magdeburg, was put in a concentration camp by the Nazis. He came to Ankara in 1935 and stayed eleven years. At the Mülkiye he taught urbanism and municipal administration; Komün Bilgisi (1940), which he wrote in Turkish, is among the first textbooks in Turkey on urban administration. After returning from Ankara he became mayor of West Berlin.
Bruno Taut. The architect who designed the workers' housing of Weimar Germany, the modernist estates of Berlin that are today on the UNESCO list. The Nazis declared him a "cultural Bolshevik"; he fled to Japan, and came to Turkey in 1936. The Faculty of Language, History and Geography building in Ankara, and Atatürk High School, are his work. At the end of 1938 he died in Istanbul; one of his last works was Atatürk's funeral catafalque.
Paul Hindemith. One of the most important German composers of the period; his music was counted "degenerate" by the Nazis. Between 1935 and 1937 he came to Ankara several times and wrote reports for Turkey's music education; he played a decisive part in the founding of the Ankara State Conservatory.
Carl Ebert. He left the country after clashing with the Nazis while director of the Berlin State Opera. In Ankara he founded the theatre and opera departments of the conservatory. The root of the state theatre and of opera in Turkey runs back to here.
Albert Eckstein. A paediatrician driven out of Düsseldorf. From 1935 to 1949 he worked at Ankara Numune Hospital; together with his wife Erna he travelled the Anatolian villages, researched the causes of child deaths, and laid the foundation of modern paediatrics in Turkey.
Benno Landsberger, Hans Gustav Güterbock, Walther Ruben. At the Faculty of Language, History and Geography they founded Sumerology, Hittitology and Indology. The scientific study of Anatolia's ancient history began with this cadre.
To these one may add Eduard Zuckmayer (he trained music teachers at Gazi Education), Ernst Praetorius (conductor of the Presidential Philharmonic, died in Ankara in 1946), Licco Amar (violin), and the German lecturers of the Higher Institute of Agriculture. The architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, who designed village schools for the Ministry of Education from Istanbul, then returned to Vienna, joined the anti-fascist resistance and was arrested by the Gestapo, is also of this generation.
The class character of this hospitality
While telling this story, let us not be captured by the official narrative of pride. Turkey took these people selectively: those who carried knowledge that would serve the founding of the state. Citizenship was not given to most of those who came; a "haymatloz" stamp, that is, stateless, was put on their passports. In the same years an important part of the ordinary Jewish refugees fleeing Europe was turned back. In 1934 there were attacks on Jews in Thrace. In February 1942 the Struma, carrying Jewish refugees fleeing Romania, was held for weeks in Istanbul, then towed into the Black Sea and sunk; one person out of about 770 survived. In the same year the Wealth Tax in effect transferred the property of non-Muslim citizens.
So there is the labour of the exiles in Ankara's enlightenment, but the door of that enlightenment was not open to everyone. The state that opened the door to knowledge closed it to the poor person without knowledge. This contradiction is the summary of the whole story of the Ankara enlightenment.
And still: the trace that Ernst Reuter left at the Mülkiye, Eckstein on the village roads, and Ebert on the stage was not erased. Ankara became a refuge for the reason that fled fascism in Europe, and that reason was passed on to Ankara's children. This is one of the most honourable legacies a city can carry. Someone from Ankara ought to know it.
The city of enlightenment
In the years the exiles arrived, Ankara was built as a city of educational and cultural institutions. Look at the chronology:
1924 The Music Teachers' School. 1925 The Ankara Law School. 1926 The Gazi Education Institute. 1932 The People's Houses. 1933 The Higher Institute of Agriculture; Yaşar Nabi's journal Varlık began publication in Ankara. 1936 The Mülkiye moved from Istanbul to Ankara; the Faculty of Language, History and Geography opened; the State Conservatory was founded. 1938 Ankara Radio began broadcasting. 1940 The Village Institutes Law. 1942 The Hasanoğlan Higher Village Institute. 1946 Ankara University. 1949 The State Theatres. 1956 Middle East Technical University. 1967 Hacettepe University.
This list is a programme by which a state raises its own intellectual. And the most progressive link of this programme was right beside Ankara, at Hasanoğlan. The Village Institutes were a model of education that would send village children back to their villages as teachers, health workers and craftspeople; it rested on the principle of learning by working, of joining production and education. At Hasanoğlan, Âşık Veysel gave bağlama lessons, and Ruhi Su gave voice lessons. As we told in The Melodious Heart: Telling Ruhi Su to Young Comrades, that child who came out of an orphans' home and walked onto the opera stage was a product of these enlightenment institutions of Ankara. As we also said while telling Whose Hand Holds the Chalk?, teaching in Turkey was defined in these years as a task of enlightenment, beyond being a profession.
The limit of the enlightenment: 1948
But the enlightenment that came from above stopped the moment the demand that came from below began.
In 1946 the passage to multi-party life was made; in 1947 Turkey entered the orbit of the United States with the Truman Doctrine. In 1948 Behice Boran, Pertev Naili Boratav, Niyazi Berkes and Adnan Cemgil were removed from the Faculty of Language, History and Geography on the grounds that they were "leftists". Boratav was studying folk literature, Boran sociology, Berkes the history of secularism; that is, they were precisely the lecturers who made the people a subject of science. Years later Behice Boran became general president of the Workers' Party of Turkey; we told this link separately in Mass or Class? A Dossier on the Workers' Party of Turkey.
From 1946 the Village Institutes were transformed by having their substance emptied, and in 1954 they were closed. The People's Houses were closed in 1951. The 1945 Law on Providing Land to Farmers, which envisaged distributing land to the peasant, was not applied, because of the resistance of the large landowners.
The balance sheet of the Ankara enlightenment must therefore be written twice: the audacity of carrying knowledge to the people, and the hand that drew back once the people began to voice their own demand with that knowledge. These two faces cannot be separated. The bourgeois limit of enlightenment is exactly this: knowledge is stopped at the point where it touches property.
A nest of culture: those whom Ankara raised
Those who slight Ankara as a "city of civil servants" forget what has flowed from Ankara into the cultural life of this country. Let us count a little; the list will stay incomplete. You complete it.
Music. The first generation raised by the State Conservatory founded Turkey's polyphonic music. The violinist Suna Kan is among the first students of this conservatory. One must mention the pianist İdil Biret, born in Ankara and opened to the world, and the concerts that generations of students listened to in the old hall of the Presidential Symphony Orchestra. Ruhi Su came out of the same conservatory; the voice that carried a polyphonic training into the folk melody, and that bound the türkü to the stage and to the class.
Literature. Sevgi Soysal's Yenişehir'de Bir Öğle Vakti (1973) is the novel that tells Ankara's bureaucratic middle class most sharply. Cemal Süreya, who came out of the Mülkiye, is the name of the poetry that walks Ankara's streets. Bilge Karasu taught philosophy at Hacettepe for years, and wrote in Ankara. Vüs'at O. Bener wrote Ankara's quiet, inward, broken people. For today's generation, Emrah Serbes's Behzat Ç. made Ankara's detective language, the streets of Kızılay, of Dikmen, of Ulus, a subject of literature and of the screen.
Theatre. The Ankara stages of the State Theatres, the Grand Theatre, the Small Theatre, the Şinasi Stage, raised this country's classical and contemporary theatre through the generations. But the institution that has a separate place in Ankara's theatre memory is the Ankara Art Theatre, AST, founded in 1963. AST was a theatre that, beside the state theatre, was independent and socialist, and that carried Brecht and the people's agenda onto the stage; for years it was mentioned together with the name of Rutkay Aziz. In the dark years of 12 September, AST's hall was one of the few places where Ankara could breathe. Old Ankarans know the smallness of that hall, and the arguments that went on on the pavement after the play.
Books. The old Dost bookshop in Kızılay was more than a bookshop: a meeting point, a news centre, a school corridor. The sentence "let's meet in front of Dost" was the address for an appointment in the Ankara before the mobile phone. The second-hand dealers of Olgunlar Street, the bookshops of Konur Street, the signing tables of Yüksel Avenue were parts of this map. A young person growing up in Ankara learned their politics, most of the time, on these pavements.
Science and the profession. The Turkish Medical Association, the Union of Chambers of Turkish Engineers and Architects and its chambers, the Union of Turkish Bar Associations, and the unions of public workers are in Ankara. The most serious reports in this country on public health, engineering, law and public administration are written on the desks of the professional organisations in Ankara. The Mülkiye, METU, Hacettepe and Ankara University raised this country's public reason through the generations; not only its bureaucrats, but also those who directed the sharpest criticism at that bureaucracy.
This is why Ankara is not a city of civil servants, but a public city. The city of the public worker, of public knowledge, of public art.
The other Ankara: the city on the hills
Let us now return to the Ankara that remained outside Jansen's plan.
From the end of the 1940s, and especially in the 1950s, the Anatolian village began to come apart. The tractors that came with the Marshall Plan mechanised agriculture on the one hand, and on the other left the landless peasant and the sharecropper without work. The first stop of this flood of people flowing to the city, to the factory, to construction, was Ankara; because Ankara was under construction, and there was work.
But there was no housing. The planned city had not set aside a place for the worker who built it. Upon this, the workers put up houses overnight, by joint labour, on treasury land around the city, on the slopes of the hills. Because the law made it harder to demolish a house whose roof was covered, these houses had to be finished in one night. The word gecekondu was born this way, and as Ankara's own word it spread to the whole country.
Altındağ, Hıdırlıktepe, Gültepe, Çinçin, Mamak, Tuzluçayır, the slopes of Dikmen Valley, the spaces between Keçiören's old vineyard houses: Ankara's hills filled with gecekondus within ten to twenty years. At the end of the 1960s nearly half of Ankara's population was living in a gecekondu.
A culture founded overnight
The gecekondu was not only a form of shelter; it was a culture, and one of the greatest urban cultures of this country.
The gecekondu neighbourhood did for itself what the state did not do. It laid the water pipe by collective labour, put up its own electricity pole, set aside its own school plot, and founded its own minibus line. Hometown associations, cemevis, coffeehouses, the grocer's book of credit, the solidarity of the women sitting in front of the door: these were the web of life of these neighbourhoods. If a family was left without work, the street knew; if there was a wedding, the whole neighbourhood joined. The village's tradition of solidarity joined with the city's poverty, and out of it came a new labourer culture, neither wholly peasant nor wholly urban.
The music of this culture became Ankara's too. The Ankara dance, the wooden spoons, the çiftetelli; a tradition of playing that came from village weddings into the gecekondu wedding halls, and from there down to the nightclubs and gazinos of Ulus. Clarinettists, darbuka players, violinists; a generation of musician-labourers known by the nickname "Ankaralı", working at another job by day and playing at night. Anyone who knows Ankara knows: this city's dance tune is the sound of the gecekondu's joy in living.
And the gecekondu neighbourhoods became political. In the Ankara of the 1960s and 1970s, the streets of Mamak, of Tuzluçayır, of Altındağ were the stage of an organised neighbourhood movement demanding its own school, its own water, its own title deed. The gecekondu labourer demanded the right to the city in practice, without knowing its name. 12 September entered these neighbourhoods with tanks. The name of that same Mamak was engraved on memories after 12 September as the name of the military prison; an important part of the torture we told in 12 September: The History, Balance Sheet, and Present of a Class Coup was lived there. On 13 December 1980 Erdal Eren, seventeen years old, was hanged in Ankara Central Closed Prison. Tunç Başaran's Uçurtmayı Vurmasınlar (1989) was filmed in that prison years later.
Düttürü Dünya: the last spring of a gecekondu
One of the films that best carried Ankara's gecekondu to the screen is Zeki Ökten's Düttürü Dünya, made in 1988. Its screenplay belongs to Umur Bugay, the screenwriter of Kapıcılar Kralı, of Çöpçüler Kralı, of Köşeyi Dönen Adam. Kemal Sunal is in the leading part; but this is not the Kemal Sunal we know, the one who makes us laugh. The film is two-thirds drama, one-third comedy, and under the laughter it leaves a knot in your throat.
Kemal Sunal plays Mehmet, a clarinettist past forty. Mehmet plays at night in a nightclub in Ulus. He goes on stage together with his friend and neighbour Rıfat, the darbuka player. Pehlivan, an aged former wrestler, works in the nightclub's cloakroom; in a break in the music he comes on stage and wrestles with a chair, and the hall, as if increasingly spellbound, watches him. That scene gathers, in a single image, both the pride and the fragility of Ankara's night labourers.
Mehmet lives in a gecekondu with his wife and three children. He has a dream of having his own compositions read onto a cassette. But debt is at his throat; by day he looks for work too, at night he arrives tired at the nightclub, and he dozes before going on stage. On the street he refills cigarette lighters. His wife does not like the night shift, or the rakı tables.
The film's main conflict is exactly the subject of this article: the plot on which Mehmet's family lives is in the brother-in-law's name, and the brother-in-law has sold it to a contractor. The gecekondu will be demolished, and a three-storey apartment block will be built in its place. Mehmet has nowhere to go.
There is one more scene which, watched today, makes one's hair stand on end: while Mehmet is refilling lighters on the street, the women of the neighbourhood walk to a rally against the cost of living, empty pots and pans in their hands, striking them against one another.
The neighbourhood in which the film is set is said, according to the account of people from the neighbourhood, to be Hıdırlıktepe; one of the Altındağ hills, right beside Ulus and the Citadel. The film goes back and forth between the nightclub in Ulus and the gecekondu on the hill; that is, between the old centre of the planned Ankara and the poor Ankara that grew, outside the plan, right above that centre.
Why 1988?
The year of the film is not a coincidence. In the Özal Turkey of the 1980s two things happened. First, with the decisions of 24 January and with 12 September, wages were suppressed; inflation passed 70 per cent. This is why the women walk with pots and pans. Second, with Law No. 2981, the building amnesty passed in 1984, the gecekondu was turned for the first time into an object of rent. The gecekondu owner, or the owner of the plot on paper, became able, with a title-allocation document, to give the plot to a contractor "in return for flats". The gecekondu neighbourhood began to turn into the neighbourhood of build-and-sell apartment blocks.
Düttürü Dünya was filmed right in the middle of this transformation. The brother-in-law's selling of the plot to the contractor is not a family drama. It is the class drama of a period: the labourer inside the gecekondu becomes a surplus in the face of the rent on the plot. The neighbourhood once founded by collective labour now turns into a market in which the title-holder and the tenant, the contractor and the musician, come apart.
Mehmet's clarinet mourns this coming apart. The film says this to us: the place where the gecekondu ends is the place where the rent begins; and that rent goes into the pocket not of the one who founded the gecekondu, but of the one who sells the plot.
Today: poverty's flight, Mamak and Keçiören
The Hıdırlıktepe of Düttürü Dünya is today an urban-transformation site. In the transformation project covering the neighbourhoods of Hıdırlıktepe, Atıfbey and İsmetpaşa, thousands of buildings were demolished by the end of 2024. If Mehmet's gecekondu existed today, it would in all likelihood already have been demolished to make room for a TOKİ block or a "residence".
Poverty did not leave Ankara. It only changed its place, and changed its form. Today Ankara's poverty has two great addresses: Mamak and Keçiören.
Mamak
Mamak, in the east of Ankara, is the district that carries the deepest traces of gecekondu history. Its population is larger than that of a good many provinces of Turkey. For long years the city's rubbish dump was in Mamak; Ankara's waste was poured at the poor person's door.
The "New Mamak Urban Transformation Project", which began in the middle of the 2000s, was announced as one of Turkey's largest transformation projects. Let us follow today's picture from the local press: according to Yeni Ankara's report of June 2026, with the delivery of 325 dwellings in the first quarter of 2026, the number of title-holders who have received a home will reach only 1,363. 8,006 dwellings remain; for these, a tender for "construction in return for land" of about 56.6 billion lira was opened in January 2026. The 10th stage, of 190 dwellings, began in February 2025 and is still going on.
Let us read these figures in class terms. In a project approaching twenty years, thousands of families lived in rent, or scattered, in the years between the demolition of their house and the delivery of the new one. The "in return for land" tender model, that is, the repetition at public scale of what Mehmet's brother-in-law did: public land is transferred to the contractor in return for dwellings; the contractor builds the share that falls to the title-holder, and sells the rest on the market. The gecekondu owner becomes a "title-holder", but most of the time pays the difference on the new flat in instalments for years; that is, becomes a homeowner by going into debt. The tenant becomes the owner of nothing; the transformation pushes them outside the neighbourhood.
And the most important thing: the gecekondu neighbourhood's doorstep, its garden, its collective labour, its neighbourliness, disappear in the car park and the lift of the block estate. Transformation demolishes not only the buildings, but also the place of solidarity.
Keçiören
Keçiören's story is a little different. The place that was once the summer vineyard houses of Ankara's notables, the vineyards of Etlik, the orchards, filled with gecekondus from the 1970s, and after the 1980s rapidly with build-and-sell apartment blocks. Today Keçiören is a sea of apartment blocks, its population larger than most of Turkey's provinces, that does not fit into its narrow streets.
Keçiören is the "successfully completed" form of the transformation that Düttürü Dünya tells: the gecekondu was demolished, and an apartment block was built in its place. But poverty did not end; it became vertical. Pensioners, unregistered workers, minimum-wage earners, women who clean by the day, living in basement flats, in damp dwellings, in homes whose rent swallows half the minimum wage. Large projects such as the Ankara North Entrance also transformed a part of this district; where the transformation reached, rent remained, and where it did not reach, an ageing stock of apartment blocks and the fear of an earthquake remained.
The impoverishment of the civil-servant city
Let us also see this: the Ankara of the "civil-servant city" itself grew poor. The public worker's salary, once counted as the security of the middle class, does not today meet the rent and the kitchen. Ankara's pensioners waited on 25 September in front of the Constitutional Court, saying "Not for money, for our honour"; in that action we lost Ali Şekeroğlu. Poverty, then, no longer lives only in the gecekondu on the hills, but also in the old civil-servant apartment blocks of Bahçelievler, of Emek, of Cebeci. As we said in the article in which we told Maricarmen's Stretcher, Elif's Key: Europe's Housing Crisis and the Class of the Home through European examples: the crisis is born not of there being too few homes, but of the home being turned into an instrument of profit.
The shadow of poverty: drugs, prostitution, the gang, and having no future
This section is not easy to write; because these subjects are usually spoken of in two ways, and both are wrong. Either in the language of the police report ("operation", "custody", "the network was smashed") or in the language of the moral sermon ("youth has degenerated", "families are not looking after their children"). The first reduces the problem to public order, the second to the individual. We will go by a third road, the road of class: drugs, prostitution and the gang are not the disease of poverty. They are the market of poverty.
From Ostim to Siteler: the young person's road, once
In the past, a young person growing up in Ankara's poor neighbourhoods had a road in front of them, hard as it was. If school did not finish, or even before it finished, they entered Ostim or Siteler as an apprentice.
Siteler, at the foot of Altındağ, is one of Turkey's largest furniture-production zones, growing from the 1960s on. Carpenter, upholsterer, polisher, carver; thousands of small workshops. The gecekondu's child entered the workshop in the morning, began by holding a broom, learned the plane, the sandpaper, the glue, and after ten years became a journeyman, then a master. Ostim, founded in 1967, is the industrial heart of Ankara, with more than 6,500 enterprises and more than 65,000 workers today; lathe, milling, welding, casting, machine maintenance. Apprenticeship was exploitation, the wage was low, workplace accidents were many; let us not romanticise this. But the apprentice was learning a craft, acquiring a trade, and, most important, entering inside a class: their master, their journeyman, their workshop mates, the coffeehouse of the industrial estate, and, even without a union, its solidarity.
This road is narrowing today. A master who has worked at Siteler for more than forty years says this to Yeni Ankara: "Because production is now done with machines, apprentices are not being raised." The master-apprentice relation has almost disappeared; a part of production has shifted to the machine, a part to the migrant worker employed off the books. A forty-three-year upholsterer in Keçiören tells the same picture from the other side: "There are customers, but no apprentices." He describes himself and his wife as "the last generation".
Ostim has changed too. Today the clusters that stand out at Ostim are defence and aviation, rail systems, medical equipment, construction machinery. Industry grew, but as it grew it came to rest not on the hand labour of the small workshop, but on the engineer, the CNC operator, the certificate, the quality document. For the gecekondu's child who left middle school halfway, the door narrowed.
Meanwhile the state reorganised apprenticeship under the name "vocational education": the Vocational Education Centres, that is, the MESEMs. A school on paper, child labour in practice. Children paid below the minimum wage, their insurance kept low because they are "students", put in front of the machine without occupational-safety training. Reports on workers' health and safety have, in recent years, recorded every year the children who lost their lives while working under the MESEM scheme. The face of the old apprenticeship that taught a craft disappeared, and the face that exploited remained.
The apprentice left without a master, the master left without an apprentice
These two sentences, "there are customers but no apprentices" and "young people cannot find work", are true at the same time. This is not a contradiction. It is the result of a system.
Looked at from the master's side: the craft is dying, because cheap serial production and unregistered labour break the price of hand labour. The master cannot promise the apprentice a trade that has a future.
Looked at from the young person's side: according to TÜİK's 2025 youth figures, 23.3 per cent of young people aged 15–24 are neither in education nor in employment; among young women this rate is 30.9 per cent. That is, one young person in four, and one young woman in three, is inside no institution, no job, no school. A large part of these young people lives in Mamak, in Keçiören, in Altındağ, in Sincan, in the poor neighbourhoods of Etimesgut.
Think of a young person: school left halfway, the workshops at Siteler will not take them, Ostim wants a certificate, at a MESEM there is ten hours of work for a few thousand lira a month, a motorcycle is needed to be a courier, and the minimum wage does not meet the rent either. And in the same neighbourhood, on the same street, someone else of the same age walks about with a new phone, new shoes, and money in their pocket. Everyone knows where that money comes from.
This is what we call the easy road. It is not easy, in fact; it is the hardest, the most dangerous, the shortest-lived road. But when all the other doors in front of one have closed, it looks like the only door left open.
The gang: youth that has been lumpenised
In recent years criminal organisations in Turkey have been having their own work done more and more by children and very young people. The reason is simple: a sentence reduction is applied to the one whose age is small; the child is cheap, easily persuaded, easily spent.
The indictment of a criminal-organisation case seen in Istanbul, according to bianet, tells this mechanism plainly: the organisation sees young people especially between 15 and 20 as a "strategic target"; an important part of the children who came into contact with the organisation had previously worked as waiters in restaurants or in other jobs. They are drawn with the promise of high money and of being taken abroad, bound with drugs and money, and those who want to leave are threatened. In the prosecution's own words, these young people are used by the organisation like "kamikaze drones".
Look well at this sentence, young comrades. A road that runs from waiting tables to being a triggerman. The young person who falls to the gang, then, does not come from outside the working class; they come from the least secure layer of the working class, from unregistered, low-paid, futureless labour. Capital used them very cheaply as a carrier of plates; the gang uses them a little more expensively, but for a much shorter time, as a carrier of a weapon. In both, the young person is an object that can be spent.
According to TÜİK's 2025 figures, the number of children who came or were brought to security units in one year is 609,959. Of these, 196,308 were recorded as "children dragged into crime"; more than half, though, are on the side not of the perpetrator of the crime, but of its victim or its witness. Of the children dragged into crime, 41.6 per cent are there for injury, 14.7 per cent for theft, and 9.7 per cent for using or trafficking drugs. Even the official language itself says "dragged into crime": the child does not go to the crime, they are dragged there. Naming the one who drags them falls to us.
Marx and Engels write that capitalism, by pushing a part of the working class outside production, turns it into a lumpenproletariat, that is, an unorganised layer of the poor, cut off from class bonds, hireable for any job. Throughout history this layer has been, in the hands of the rulers, an instrument both of crime and of repression: both the gang's triggerman and the strikebreaker's club. The process that pushes a part of Ankara's poor youth to the gang is exactly this process of lumpenisation. And the opposite of this is not a police operation. It is binding them back to the class: to work, to a trade, to a union, to an organisation, to solidarity.
Drugs: the neighbourhood's new economy
One of the greatest destructions of the last twenty years in Ankara's poor neighbourhoods is the spread of cheap synthetic drugs. First the synthetic cannabinoids known by the name "bonzai", then cheap stimulant pills and methamphetamine. The common feature of these substances is their cheapness: while expensive drugs remain the entertainment of wealthy districts, the cheap and lethal ones come down to the streets of the poor neighbourhoods.
Drugs are lived in the poor neighbourhood in two forms. The first is as consumption: the way a young person with no future numbs their present, the way they escape boredom, unemployment, the feeling of worthlessness. The second is as work: small-scale selling, street dealing, courier work. If there is no work in the neighbourhood, the drug trade turns into a field of employment. The young dealer is the link at the very bottom of the chain, the one who takes the most risk, earns the least, and is caught most easily; just like the worker at the very bottom of the main industry's subcontracting chain. The profit at the top of the chain, no dealer ever sees.
When Engels, in The Condition of the Working Class in England, tells of the drink and opium addiction that spread in the workers' neighbourhoods of Manchester, he ties it not to the workers' moral weakness, but to the desperation of their conditions of life: the only thing that frees a person, for a few hours, from the machine, from poverty, from anxiety about the future. A hundred and eighty years have passed; the substance has changed, the mechanism has not.
And let us say one thing plainly: the struggle against drugs is not won by "operation" reports. In Ankara it is often announced that hundreds of thousands of pills have been seized; but the price on the street does not fall, and the young person in the neighbourhood goes on dying. Because the demand stays in place; the futurelessness that creates the demand stays in place. What the addicted person needs is not punishment but treatment, and what the neighbourhood needs is not the police but a youth centre, a sports field, a library, work and a trade.
Prostitution: where the body is the last commodity
The result of poverty that is spoken of most quietly is that women and young people are forced to sell their bodies.
Ankara has a long and bitter history on this. The nightclubs of Ulus in Düttürü Dünya were a night economy that turned on the one hand on the musician's labour, and on the other on the labour of the young women seated at the tables. Most of those women also came from the gecekondu, from the poor provinces, from a bad marriage, or from debt. The film shows this too: the nightclub is the place that consumes both the man and the woman of the gecekondu.
Today this economy has changed form. The nightclub has grown fewer, and "escort" advertisements, social-media accounts, places that look like massage parlours, and "sugar daddy" arrangements have multiplied. In Ankara, "prostitution operation" reports are made at regular intervals; in those reports too it is again the woman at the bottom of the chain who is caught, and the intermediary at the top of the chain, the owner of the place, the "boss", most of the time does not appear. The most defenceless link of this economy is migrant women; women without papers, who do not know the language, silenced by the fear of deportation. Academic studies on migrant women and the sex trade in Turkey show that an important part of these women were pushed into this economy by debt, by deception and by force.
Here too let us avoid two errors. The first is to blame these women and young people. The one forced to sell their body is the convict not of their own morality, but of the system. The second is to romanticise this as a "free choice". The "choice" of a young woman squeezed from all four sides by unemployment, debt, rent and family pressure is like the "freedom" Marx described for the worker: either you sell your labour, or you die of hunger. Capitalism turns everything into a commodity; the human body too is the last stop of this commodification.
This is not a moral question. It is a class question.
Let us bring this whole picture together.
| The ruling account | The class reading |
|---|---|
| "Youth has degenerated, it has lost its values" | The doors of a trade, of work and of a future in front of youth were closed |
| "Families are not looking after their children" | Families are in two jobs, on long shifts, inside debt; the time they would give to the child has been taken from their hands |
| "Young people do not want to work, they want easy money" | The return on working does not pay the rent; even the "hard road" does not guarantee a future |
| "The struggle against drugs = an operation" | What creates the demand is futurelessness; the dealer is the bottom of the chain, the top stays unseen |
| "Prostitution is immoral" | The commodification of the body is the last result of poverty and of debt |
| "The gang member is a criminal" | The child is an insecure labourer, dragged from waiting tables to being a triggerman |
| "These neighbourhoods' fate" | These neighbourhoods were once the labour store of Ostim, of Siteler, of construction; not fate, but abandonment |
The right-hand column of this table says this to us: there is no such thing as "saving" the youth of Ankara's poor neighbourhoods; there is securing that youth's return to their class. A young person who learns a trade in a workshop, who organises in a union, who founds a football team in a neighbourhood association, who studies in a library, who sings a türkü in a choir, is a young person taken out of the hands of the gang and of the dealer.
The old collective labour of the gecekondu neighbourhood is exactly this: not leaving anyone alone. Where the neighbourhood is organised, the young person has a web to take refuge in; when the web comes apart, someone else fills the gap. Organisation is the antidote to lumpenisation. As the gecekondu's web of solidarity came apart with urban transformation, with migration, with individualisation, the dealer and the gang settled into that gap.
The city that was once a refuge
And a last image in Ankara's mirror. In the 1930s Ankara opened its door, selectively though it was, to the exiles fleeing the war in Europe. Today those fleeing another war, from Syria, live in Ankara's poorest gecekondu neighbourhoods, in Altındağ, beside the old gecekondu labourers. In August 2021 there were attacks on Syrians in Altındağ. Setting the poor against the poor is capital's oldest game. As we also said in our article What Is This Thing Called Racism?: the opposition between the migrant and the local poor is not natural; it is constructed. The Anatolian peasant who founded the gecekondu, and the refugee who lives on the same hills today, are different generations of the same class.
Ankara's memory of resistance
Ankara is the capital; for that reason the road of everyone in this country who seeks their right falls, sooner or later, to Ankara. This makes Ankara the capital not only of the state, but also of objection.
In January 1991 the Zonguldak miners set out saying "we are marching to Ankara"; the march was stopped at Mengen, but it was engraved on the memory of Turkey's working class. In the 1990s public workers organised in Ankara even though they had no union rights; public-worker unionism was born on Ankara's streets. From December 2009 to March 2010 the Tekel workers resisted for 78 days on Sakarya Avenue, in the Ankara cold, in nylon tents; people from Ankara carried them soup. In June 2013 Ethem Sarısülük was shot in Kızılay. On 10 October 2015 those who gathered in front of Ankara Station for "Labour, Peace, Democracy" were massacred; we lost more than a hundred of our people. “The 10 October Dossier” Is Out tells that day and those we lost. This year, on 16 September, the peasants of Akbelen walked from in front of the Council of State to the ministry's door. On 25 September the pensioners were in front of the Constitutional Court.
Ankara's squares, Kızılay, Güvenpark, Sıhhiye, Tandoğan, Abdi İpekçi, are the addresses at which this country's labourers call to account. The one who tells Ankara as "the city of the state" forgets these squares.
The state's Ankara, the people's Ankara
Let us gather this whole history in one table.
| The state's Ankara | The people's Ankara |
|---|---|
| The Ministries, the General Staff, the Palace | The gecekondu, the coffeehouse, the cemevi, the hometown association |
| Jansen's plan, Yenişehir | The hills founded overnight, outside the plan |
| The state that took the exiled scientists "for as long as they were of use" | The students, physicians and teachers who carry their knowledge |
| The purge of 1948, the closing of the Village Institutes | Those whom Hasanoğlan, the faculty and the conservatory raised |
| Mamak Military Prison | The organised neighbourhoods of Mamak and of Tuzluçayır |
| The building amnesty, flats in return, the urban-transformation tender | Mehmet the clarinettist, the women walking with pots and pans, the tenant who could not become a title-holder |
| "The city of civil servants" | The city of the public worker, of the student, of the professional organisation |
| The door of the Assembly | The front of Güvenpark, of Sakarya Avenue, of the Station |
| The Ankara of rent | The Ankara of the public |
Ankara is the struggle of these two columns. And to stand by Ankara is to stand by the second column.
Ankara's task inside Turkey, with a class vision
What, then, should be the task in this country of the capital that is one hundred and three years old today? Let us set down a few principles with a class vision.
Ankara must be the city of the public. Ankara's founding idea was to build the public where there was nothing: the public university, the public theatre, the public conservatory, the public hospital. Today each of these institutions is being opened to the market, privatised, emptied. Ankara's task is to defend these institutions and to widen them. That the public university be free of fees, the public theatre cheap, the public hospital reachable, is Ankara's own reason for existing.
Ankara must be the organised voice of the public worker. The greatest concentration of public workers in this country is in Ankara. The struggle over the civil servant's salary, the pension, the public worker's wage, is waged in this city. Public workers should organise not only for their own wages, but also for the quality of the public service they provide. The physician, the teacher, the engineer, the librarian: Ankara's public worker is the guardian of the people's public right.
Ankara must go on being the city of enlightenment; but this time from below. The enlightenment of the 1930s came from above and struck the limit of class. Today's enlightenment comes about by rebuilding from below Hasanoğlan's principle of "learning by working", the culture of the People's Houses that went down into the neighbourhood, AST's socialist stage, the argument in front of Dost. Knowledge should not be stopped at the point where it touches property; it should deepen exactly there.
Ankara must protect the memory of the gecekondu. Urban transformation is not an inevitable natural event; it is a choice about property. Transformation can be planned, without indebting the title-holder, without throwing the tenant out, without scattering the neighbourhood, with the neighbourhood's own assemblies. The neighbourhood-assembly model we told in the guide we prepared on Joining Local Government: From the Kent Konseyi to the People's Assembly is the way for the people of the neighbourhood to have a say in the transformation of Mamak and of Keçiören.
Ankara must be the capital of objection. The road of everyone in this country who seeks their right falls to Ankara. Ankara's labourers, its students, its professional organisations, should give a welcome to the miner, the peasant, the pensioner who comes to Ankara. The Ankara that carried soup to the Tekel workers is Ankara's most beautiful face.
Ankara must not set the poor against the poor. The grandchildren of the Anatolian peasant who founded the gecekondu, and the refugee who lives on the same hills today, are the children of the same propertylessness. Ankara was a refuge for those fleeing fascism in the 1930s; today too it should be not the enemy of those fleeing war, but their class sibling.
Concrete tasks
A diagnosis is not a programme. Let us be concrete.
- Write the history of your own neighbourhood. When was the neighbourhood you live in founded, who founded it, how did the water come, how was the school opened? Talk to the elders of the neighbourhood, and record it. The gecekondu generation is leaving us quickly; let that memory not go with them.
- Watch Düttürü Dünya, then climb to Hıdırlıktepe. Watch the film with a group of friends, then walk from the Citadel to Hıdırlıktepe. Look at what is there today, and what is not. When a film screening turns into a neighbourhood walk, it turns into a political action.
- Follow the urban-transformation projects. In Mamak, in Keçiören, in Altındağ, which stage is where, how many title-holders are there, how many tenants were pushed out of the neighbourhood? Follow the municipal-council decisions and the tender announcements. You cannot object to a transformation you do not know.
- Do not forget the tenant. In transformation debates the "title-holder" is spoken of, and the tenant is not. Bring together the tenants in your neighbourhood; found a tenants' solidarity.
- Stand by the public institutions. Raise your voice against the emptying of the State Theatres, of the opera, of the public university, of the public hospital. Go to the Grand Theatre on a student ticket; as long as the hall is full, the institution lives.
- Support the independent nests of culture. Where are today's counterparts of AST, of the old Dost, of the second-hand dealers of Olgunlar? Go to independent theatres, bookshops, second-hand dealers, cooperatives, and do your shopping there.
- Give a welcome to the objection that comes to Ankara. When the miner, the peasant, the pensioner comes to Ankara, do not leave them alone. A thermos of tea, a hot soup, a crowd: the solidarity we learned in the Tekel tents is as simple as this.
- Do not leave the neighbourhood's young person alone. What is there in your neighbourhood for young people who are neither in education nor in work? Found a football team, a homework-support group, a music workshop, a book club. The dealer's greatest rival is a web of solidarity that fills the young person's time with meaning.
- Bring the master and the young person together. Bring together the masters looking for an apprentice in Siteler, in Ostim, in the workshops of your neighbourhood, and the young people looking for work. But so that apprenticeship does not turn into exploitation, be the one who follows the insurance, the wage, the occupational safety; follow the conditions of the children employed in the MESEMs, and make them visible.
- Ask for treatment, not punishment, for addiction. Demand from the municipalities consultation and treatment centres that are free, that do not stigmatise, and that are close to the neighbourhood. An addicted young person is not a criminal, but a patient; that they can reach treatment is a public right.
- Ask about the top of the chain. When you read an "operation" report, ask: who was caught, and who is at the top of the chain? Asking the question that makes visible not the dealer, not the woman in the place, but the one who collects the profit, turns the moral sermon into class analysis.
- Get to know your refugee neighbour. Meet the refugee families living in Altındağ and in Mamak, and share in the children's school problems and the rent problems. The antidote to enmity is getting to know one another.
- Answer the one who slights Ankara. To the one who says "there is nothing to do in Ankara", show the list of institutions, of people, of squares in this article. To stand by Ankara is first to stand by its story.
- Organise. The union, the professional chamber, the neighbourhood association, the city council, the student collective. The collective labour that founded the gecekondu neighbourhood lives today by organisation.
Dear comrades,
One hundred and three years ago today, a steppe town became the capital. The Anatolian peasant defended that town, the exiles of Europe enlightened it, the gecekondu labourer enlarged it. The state counted it as its own city; but what made Ankara Ankara was the load carried not by the state, but by the labourer and by reason.
Ankara has no sea. But Ankara has a hill from which, looking, you see both the Assembly and the gecekondu at the same time. The story of this country was written between those two views. The road Mehmet the clarinettist walked from the nightclub in Ulus to the house on the hill is the road this country's labourer walks.
Ankara is a poor city. A city that is not ashamed of its poverty, that organises its poverty, that founded a republic on the steppe. To those who call it "grey", show the hand that carried soup to the Tekel tent in the Ankara cold, the young person waiting in front of Dost, the crowd arguing on AST's pavement, the family that covered a roof overnight on Hıdırlıktepe.
The capital is not the place where the state sits; it is the place where the people come to call it to account. To stand by Ankara is to stand by the city of that account.
Many years to you, Ankara.
In comradeship.
Our related articles
Enlightenment and culture
- The Melodious Heart: Telling Ruhi Su to Young Comrades — the conservatory, Hasanoğlan, and the state that raised a patriot and then punished him
- Whose Hand Holds the Chalk? — the class history of teaching in Turkey, the Village Institutes
- Our Education Dossier Is Out: Whose School Is It? — polytechnic education and class
Ankara's memory
- “The 10 October Dossier” Is Out — the Ankara Station massacre and those we lost
- 12 September: The History, Balance Sheet, and Present of a Class Coup — Mamak, Erdal Eren, and a class coup
- Mass or Class? A Dossier on the Workers' Party of Turkey — from Behice Boran to today
The city and housing
- Maricarmen's Stretcher, Elif's Key: Europe's Housing Crisis and the Class of the Home — the home turned into an instrument of profit
- Joining Local Government: From the Kent Konseyi to the People's Assembly — from the city council to the people's assembly
- What Is This Thing Called Racism? — the ideology that sets the poor against the poor
Sources
- Yeni Ankara — The latest on the New Mamak Urban Transformation: which stages will be delivered in 2026? (June 2026; 1,363 delivered, 8,006 dwellings remaining, a 56.6 billion lira tender)
- Ankara Net Haber — We researched neighbourhood by neighbourhood in Ankara: the areas urban transformation has not reached (Hıdırlıktepe–Atıfbey–İsmetpaşa, New Mamak, the North Ankara Entrance)
- Yeni Ankara — Those films that locked millions to their screens were shot in Ankara (Düttürü Dünya, Uçurtmayı Vurmasınlar, and Ankara cinema)
- Paul Benjamin Osterlund, FLANÖR — Düttürü Dünya: An Intimate Look at Ankara's Underbelly in the 80's (June 2026; the characters, the nightclub in Ulus, the demolition of the gecekondu, the pots-and-pans scene)
- Zıtlar Mecmuası — Cinematic Ankara: letters on the film "Düttürü Dünya" (Hıdırlıktepe, Çinçin, the gecekondu and urban transformation)
- bianet — Screenwriter Umur Bugay has died (the screenplay of Düttürü Dünya)
- Ernst Reuter, Komün Bilgisi: Şehirciliğe Giriş, Ankara, 1940
- Sevgi Soysal, Yenişehir'de Bir Öğle Vakti, 1973
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