This is the twelvth part in a series about riding night trains across Europe and the Near East to Armenia—to spend time in worlds beyond the pathological obsessions of Donald Trump. (This week newly installed President Elon Musk and his social media spokesman, Donald Trump, did their best to furlough most of the federal government, including everyone working for US AID, the FBI, CIA, and Department of Education.)
Mustafa Kemal (also known as Atatürk), second from the left in black tie, wanted Turkey (the 1923 successor of the Ottoman Empire) to be both a secular state and to remain a power in the muslim world—an inherent contradiction. Photo of a museum photo by Matthew Stevenson.
Close to the Ankara train station and my hotel was the Museum of the Republic. Just up the street was a second, similar museum dedicated to the War of Independence in 1923. Both were in buildings that housed the Turkish parliament in the early days of the republic, the successor state to the Ottoman Empire.
Under the terms of the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres—complimentary to the Treaty of Versailles and others signed in Paris after World War I—the Ottoman Empire was divided into zones of Allied occupation: Britain (and an international contingent) got Çanakkale and the Straits; Italy controlled Antalya and southern Turkey; France occupied eastern Turkey north of Syria; and Turkey itself was reduced to an area around Ankara. (The United States refused to take up a mandate over Armenia.)
No sooner was the Ottoman Empire partitioned than Greece invaded east from its zone of occupation around Izmir (then Smyrna), which touched off the conflict that became known as the Turkish war of independence. (It could be argued that it is still being fought to this day, especially in Kurdistan and Syria, if not in Gaza.)
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Led by Mustafa Kemal (aka Atatürk, which means “Father of the Turks”), the Turkish army fought from just outside Ankara all the way to the Mediterranean coast, culminating in the 1922 battle of Smyrna, which saw thousands of Greeks massacred on the waterfront (the number of victims varies from about 10,000 to 100,000) and ended the “Ionian visions” that Greater Greece would include ancient Greek cities in Anatolia.
In The Ottoman Endgame: War, Revolution and the Making of the Modern Middle East, 1908-1923 (which I had with me on my Kindle), historian Sean McMeekin writes:
Whoever actually started the great fire of Smyrna, it seems clear that many Turks saw it as poetic justice for the dozens of cities and towns the Greeks had put to the flames farther inland. For the fact remains that, even if many Turks lost property and a few mosques in the old city were burned, it was the Christians of Smyrna, Ottoman and European alike, who lost everything. What perished alongside the old city of Smyrna in September 1922 was the very idea that Greeks and Turks, Christians and Muslims, could live together peacefully in Asia Minor—or in mainland Greece, for that matter.
After their defeat in Smyrna, hundreds of thousands of Greeks living in Asia Minor fled to the state we think of as Greece, and after the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne re-drew the demarcation lines of the Treaty of Sèvres, Turkey declared its independence and republic, with Atatürk as its founding president. He had been the general in charge of defeating the Greeks in western Anatolia, just as, when he was a more junior officer, he had led the counterattacks at Gallipoli when the Allies tried to capture the Dardanelles in 1915.
Many museums in Ankara and Turkey are little more than exhibitions on the life and times of Mustafa Kemal; the Museum of the Republic has a display cabinet showing off his top hat and tails (he liked western formal wear).
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If the Museum of the Republic is devoted to early parliamentary procedures and Atatürk’s greatness as a politician, the Museum of the War of Independence (just up the road and on the corner of a busy intersection in old Ankara) is more concerned with his brilliance as a military commander.
In those displays cases, there are maps, flags, daggers, and pistols devoted to the cause of independence, which, in effect, was fought from 1914, when the Ottoman Empire (then on its last legs) decided to enter World War I on the side of the German allies.
In the two years previous to the Great War, in the two Balkan Wars (1912-13), the Ottoman Empire had largely been evicted from the European mainland. (It kept a rump presence near Edirne and the Bosphorus Straits.)
Then in World War I, the western Allies (France, Britain, and Russia) did their best to dismember the empire once referred to as the “sick man of Europe.” The British and French fought on sea and land at Gallipoli throughout much of 1915, eventually withdrawing in defeat at the end of the year. In Egypt and Palestine from 1916-18, largely British forces—including the camel corps in which T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia) often rode—attacked toward Jerusalem, Damascus, and the Hejaz Railway, which all fell in 1918.
Britain also sent an army up the Euphrates River in Mesopotamia against Ottoman forces, although they were surrounded and annihilated at Kut. Finally, Russian forces in World War I attacked from the Caucasus into eastern Turkey, besieging Kars and capturing the strategic city of Erzurum (to which I was headed).
In the midst of all these campaigns, the Ottoman leadership vented its rage against Armenian citizens of the empire, which led to the deaths (on forced marches or through starvations and beatings) of more than a million Armenians (the survivors were scattered into the Caucasus and Asia Minor). And it was to make sense of this sweep of history—especially from Anatolia to Erzurum and Kars—that I was now biking around Ankara and buying a railway ticket on the Dogu Express to eastern Turkey.
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From the Museum of the War of Independence, I biked up a short, steep hill to the Ulus Victory Monument, a statue of Atatürk on horseback, symbolically leading the nation to victory and independence. Then I set out on a bike ride that could only be considered folly.
I had a map in my pocket that showed “key sights” around Ankara, and I had GPS on my phone, which was clamped to my bicycle handlebars. But nothing prepared me for the absurdity of an Ankara bike ride, in which I found myself riding on broken sidewalks or standing at busy intersections trying to push the bike across the street.
I had ridden the same bicycle in New York, Moscow, London, Rome, and Saigon, and despite some learning curves I had managed to master the navigation through serious traffic. But here in Ankara I was defeated.
Most roads I headed down were clogged with cars, buses, and trucks, and even side streets that felt like death alleys. I went this way and that, searching for something like a bus lane in which I could ride, but came up with nothing.
After about an hour of such futility (add in a few steep hills to match), I gave up and rode back to my hotel, considering whether I might not even take the bike the following day, when I had planned to ride to Atatürk’s presidential home, now a museum on the outskirts of the metropolis. To use an expression from the Tour de France, I was thinking of “putting my foot on the ground,” an unpleasant consideration for any cyclist.
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I never left the hotel that evening (Ankara isn’t much of a city for pedestrians, but it does have sidewalks), and I spent much of my time after dinner with various city maps unfolded on my bed, trying to make sense of my possible ride the next day. As best I could tell, Atatürk’s house museum was about five miles from my hotel, on the far side of the Turkish State Cemetery and more war memorials.
On my phone and computer, I calculated various routes, and in the end, after a good night’s sleep, I came to the decision that I would start out on the bike and only give up if the traffic was unbearable. A full hotel breakfast further fortified me, and encouragement from the hotel staff (which by this point had warmed to the folding bicycle as a symbol of American eccentricity) made me think I might be able to succeed.
Once I got away from the small, crowded streets around my hotel, I rode along a wide boulevard, which in a few sections even had what looked like bicycle paths. The ride was uphill, but not steep, and I settled into the rhythm of watching both GPS on my phone and my lane for errant cars.
Beyond the the city downtown, I even began to enjoy the ride, although in a few places I found myself confused about the GPS directions, which forced me to hand-carry the bike across broad boulevards with a concrete meridians.
Eventually, following GPS, I turned right off the main boulevard and started riding on a wide, but strangely empty boulevard that, I soon discovered, was laced with police roadblocks and checkpoints.
By this point I was on an official bike lane, so I decided to press on, as Atatürk’s house was only a mile or so from my tracked location. It would have been a shame, after all this riding, if I had start again or find some other path through Ankara’s concrete wilderness.
At the very worst, I figured, the police would stop me from carrying on, but at the first checkpoint an officer cheerfully waved me on. Surely, I said to myself, all this security wasn’t for the protection of the house where Atatürk lived when he was the Turkish president from 1923 – 1938.
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Only when I biked to the top of the long incline did it dawn on me that I was riding on the (blocked) boulevard that led directly to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s “Presidential Complex,” his 300,000 square meter mansion that cost more than $600 million to build.
For years I had been reading about the building, but had no idea where in Ankara it was until I got to a second police barrier and checkpoint just opposite the main gates. Strangely, even at this checkpoint I was waved on, as if the Turkish president was expecting someone on a bike.
As much as I wanted to stop and take a picture of the building, I didn’t want to take out my phone, especially as at the top of the hill (opposite the main gates) there was a platoon of police soldiers keeping an eye on things. There was also a memorial to the failed 2015 coup in the plaza near the front gate, so I asked one of the policemen if he would take my picture in front of the monument.
If pictures were not allowed, he would say so, and if pictures were questionable I would rather say later that it was a police officer who had taken mine. Then I stood in front of the coup memorial in such a way that when the policeman took my picture, he would get the palace complex in the background, which is what happened.
Looking past the memorial at the front of the presidential mansion, I wondered whether this building was larger than Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Palace of Parliament. Both buildings seemed to have about 300,000 square meters and more than 1,000 rooms, and both seemed designed to house a government under siege, should things come to that (as they did for Ceaușescu, although when those bells tolled, his edifice complex was still evolving).
I later read that Erdoğan’s MacMansion has a library with 5 million books, fully functioning health clinic, nearby mosque, and full-service bomb shelter, which he needed in 2015, when insurrectionists attacked Erdoğan’s palace from the air. (He survived.)
The Ceaușescu manse, carved from stone, resembles an Orwellian ministry of fear, while Erdoğan’s residence looks more like the headquarters of a regional insurance company near Phoenix. Both speak to a government of pharaohs.
