Why it looks like this

Old Ankara is the knot of lanes around the hilltop citadel — a modest Anatolian trading town. When Mustafa Kemal Atatürk declared it the capital of the new republic in 1923, a planned city had to be invented next to it.

German planner Hermann Jansen won the competition to design the new capital: broad boulevards, ministries and embassy quarters running south through Yenişehir ('new city') and Kızılay. The map still splits cleanly into the organic old hill and the drawn modern axis.