Turkish Culture II: Ankara is SO BORING

Ankara is the capital city of Turkey, and if I had one lira for every time a Turkish person has told me that it is a boring hellhole, I could buy a plane ticket from Ankara back to Istanbul. For a long time it was a mystery to me how nearly all Turkish people could feel such unbridled hatred for their capital city, so I decided to go there to learn what none of the fuss was about.

To be honest, Ankara is a fairly inoffensive city with some nice trees and one huge mausoleum (on which more some other time). But okay. My Turkish friends were right. After admiring the trees and the mausoleum, there’s nothing in particular to do.

In Ankara, there are some trees.

A friend of mine and I have a pact to send each other postcards from the worst most uninspiring areas of the world that we can find, so as soon as I discovered how right everybody was about Ankara’s things-to-do scene, I went on the postcard hunt. Finding myself in a huge underground bookstore, I soon realized that, not only do Turkish people hate Ankara, they do not even consider it exciting enough to make postcards about.

That’s bad. Even Ottawa has postcards.

As luck would have it, I spied a teetering pile of dusty secondhand paperbacks and wondered if I could find some funny covers to rip off and use instead.

On the left, ‘fiery nights.’ On the right, ‘what women want.’

I was not disappointed. The paperbacks turned out to be Turkish-language Harlequins from the 1990s. Not only did they do their duty as postcards, they confirmed that people in Ankara get up to the same thing as people in boring cities everywhere.

Suddenly overcome, I wiped a single tear from my eye. From Margaree, Nova Scotia (which, believe it or not, is more boring than Ankara) to Ankara Turkey, one thing transcends the manifold cultures of humankind: where there is nothing to do there is always at least one thing to do.

But seriously, if you’re planning a trip to Turkey, don’t go to Ankara. I’m not sure if the faint possibility of a fiery night is worth the trouble.