Ankara

Overview

Ankara is the capital of Turkey and has served as the republic’s political center since its founding in 1923. After World War I, the Turkish national movement made the inland city its headquarters, and the new republic transferred the capital from Istanbul to Ankara. The choice gave the state a capital in the Anatolian interior, away from Istanbul’s position on the Bosporus. Ankara subsequently grew into the seat of the presidency, government ministries, parliament and foreign embassies. It is also a university city and a center of administration, industry and commerce. Its importance in regional affairs follows chiefly from those national institutions: decisions made in Ankara shape Turkey’s diplomacy, armed forces and relations with neighboring states.

The city’s history extends well before the republic. Known in antiquity as Ancyra and later widely as Angora, it stood on routes connecting central Anatolia with other parts of Asia Minor and lands farther east. Jewish merchants used Ankara as a trading stop on journeys toward Persia and the Far East; some settled there permanently. Jewish exiles from Spain and Portugal later enlarged its community. In modern politics, Ankara was where Abdullah Öcalan studied and organized before founding the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, in 1978. Since Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party took power in 2002, the capital has directed a more ambitious regional policy. That policy has brought Ankara into disputes over Syria, Cyprus, maritime boundaries, arms procurement and its continuing support for Hamas, a terrorist organization.

Geography

Ankara lies in Central Anatolia, well inland from Turkey’s Mediterranean, Aegean and Black Sea coasts. Its location gave the republican government a capital distinct from Istanbul, the former Ottoman imperial center. The city’s position also places it at the hub of routes between western Anatolia, eastern Turkey and the wider Middle East. That geography mattered to earlier merchants, including Jews carrying goods through Ankara toward Persia. It remains relevant to the modern state: Ankara coordinates policy concerning the borders with Syria, Iraq and Iran, though the city itself is distant from those frontiers.

Turkey’s geographic reach also makes the capital central to disputes beyond Anatolia. Ankara’s policies affect the Eastern Mediterranean, where Turkey contests maritime boundaries and energy projects involving Cyprus, Greece and Israel. A 2019 agreement with Libya drew Greek objections because Athens held that it disregarded the maritime rights of islands including Crete and Rhodes. Cyprus, Israel and the European Union also opposed Ankara’s claims. Turkey’s dams give its government significant influence over water flowing south and east: dams on the Euphrates reduced its flow toward northern Syria, while the Ilisu Dam gives Ankara substantial control over Tigris flows reaching Iraq. These issues make the capital a decision-making center for resources shared across borders.

Ancient and biblical history

Ancyra’s history reflects central Anatolia’s succession of ancient powers. The settlement became associated with the Galatians and later formed part of the Roman world. A bronze inscription found in Ankara records rights that Emperor Augustus accorded to Jews of Asia Minor, providing evidence of Jewish life within the wider region under Roman rule. The city remained important through Byzantine and Ottoman periods before becoming the Turkish republic’s capital. Its older name, Angora, remained familiar internationally for products associated with the city and its surrounding area. These layers of history explain why Ankara contains both traces of ancient Anatolia and institutions built for a twentieth-century nation-state.

Ankara is not identified as a setting for a biblical event in the material used for this entry. Its relevance to biblical-era history lies instead in the wider history of Asia Minor, including Jewish communities that lived there under Roman rule. The ancient inscription concerning Augustus does not establish the size or continuity of a Jewish settlement in Ankara itself. The city’s documented Jewish history becomes clearer in later accounts of merchants, Ottoman-era communities and the arrivals from Iberia. Keeping those periods distinct avoids turning evidence about Jews across Asia Minor into a claim about the city at a particular ancient date.

Jewish history

Ankara developed a Jewish trading community before the expulsions from Iberia. Merchants traveling toward Persia and the Far East stopped in the city, and some made it their permanent home. They participated in commerce linking inland Anatolia to longer-distance routes. Jews in Ankara ordered silk wares from Persia and sold them across Turkey. That trade helps explain how a community could take root in a city whose later fame came chiefly from its political role. Its earlier Jewish residents were joined by exiles from Spain and Portugal, whose arrival brought substantial growth and established Spanish and Portuguese congregational communities.

The Spanish and Portuguese Jewish communities united in the mid-sixteenth century and included Ankara’s earlier Jewish residents. Recorded figures show the scale of their growth: the community numbered 231 people in the 1520s and 747 in the 1570s. Those figures describe a comparatively small population, but one large enough to sustain communal institutions and commercial networks. The Iberian arrivals connected Ankara to the broader movement of Jews across the Ottoman Empire after the expulsions from Spain and Portugal. Their settlement also forms part of the history of Jewish communities in Anatolia, including those in Istanbul and İzmir.

The community later faced repeated losses. The plague of 1672 reduced its numbers, and many Jews left Ankara during the nineteenth century. Even so, communal life continued: Ankara’s Jews established a permanent religious court in the eighteenth century. The court indicates an organized community with enduring religious and legal needs despite demographic change. Ankara also formed part of a network of movement between Ottoman cities. Jews who settled in İzmir came from Ankara as well as Istanbul, Safed, Mediterranean islands, Italy and Holland. Migration therefore worked in more than one direction, linking the city’s Jewish history to trade, family ties and opportunities elsewhere.

Migration after World War II further reduced Ankara’s Jewish population, from about 1,500 to 800. The recorded figure was 1,000 in 1968, while estimates for 2005 placed the community at 700 to 800. These counts mark a long decline from the postwar level, although they also show that Jewish life persisted in the capital. Ankara’s synagogue and the history of its former Jewish quarter remain part of that record. The community’s story encompasses more than the Iberian arrivals: it began with merchants and earlier residents, grew under Ottoman rule, maintained institutions through epidemics and outward migration, and continued into the republican period.

Modern history

Ankara became the capital of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, replacing Istanbul after World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the new state built its central institutions in the city. In the decades after World War II, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s territorial demands against Turkey helped push Ankara into alliance with the West. Turkey’s membership in NATO made the capital a major center of Western security policy during the Cold War. Its later governments retained that alliance while pursuing policies that at times produced sharp disagreements with other NATO members.

Ankara also figured in the origins of a prolonged conflict between Turkey and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party. Abdullah Öcalan attended vocational high school in the city and later studied political science at Ankara University. By 1973, he had organized Apocus, a Maoist group. He left Ankara in 1978 and founded the PKK with associates in southeastern Turkey, seeking an independent Kurdish state. The group’s later armed campaign made Kurdish autonomy and security along Turkey’s borders enduring concerns for successive governments in Ankara. Turkey also regarded the PKK’s continued presence in the Qandil Mountains as a security concern and pressed for its military structure to be dismantled.

The Justice and Development Party, or AKP, won Turkey’s 2002 national election and came to power in Ankara under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Its leaders sought greater influence across the Middle East, initially emphasizing trade, diplomacy and other forms of soft power. Their approach reflected an ambition to restore regional leadership after the end of Ottoman rule. Events in Syria exposed limits to that strategy. When rebellion spread there in 2011, Turkish leaders first urged President Bashar al-Assad to reform. Foreign minister Ahmet Davutoğlu spent six hours with Assad in August pressing him to stop killing civilians. After Assad’s forces entered Hama following that visit, Ankara severed diplomatic ties with his government and backed rebels in northern Syria, giving them safe haven and allowing weapons to cross from Turkey.

The Syrian war also strained Ankara’s relations with Moscow and Tehran. Russia supported Assad, while Turkey supported his opponents. Turkey shot down a Russian aircraft that entered its airspace in November 2015, and Russia imposed economic sanctions. Vladimir Putin’s call to Erdoğan the day after Turkey’s failed 2016 coup helped repair their relationship. Ankara proposed talks on Syria involving Egypt, Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, but Tehran rejected the proposal. Turkey has generally supported measures to prevent the Iranian regime from acquiring nuclear weapons, even as Ankara and Tehran have avoided direct hostilities. Their cooperation on some regional matters has existed alongside opposing interests in Syria.

Cyprus and Libya have been other arenas of Turkish policy directed from Ankara. Turkey’s 1974 invasion partitioned Cyprus, leaving relations with Nicosia tense. From October 2020, Ankara promoted a two-state outcome for the island instead of reunification under a federal arrangement. In Libya, Turkey traditionally backed the Tripoli-based government, while Egypt and the United Arab Emirates backed Khalifa Haftar’s Benghazi-based forces. Turkish intervention reversed Haftar’s gains and strengthened Ankara’s prospects for influence. Abdul Hamid Dbeibeh later assured Turkey that Libya would honor its maritime delimitation agreement, which challenged plans for an EastMed energy route involving Israel and its partners. Athens and Ankara resumed exploratory talks in 2021 after a five-year break, but relations worsened again when Erdoğan declared on May 23, 2022, that Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis no longer existed for him.

Security

Ankara’s security policy in Syria has focused partly on the PKK and the People’s Defense Units, or YPG, in northern Syria. PKK-affiliated armed fighters there alarmed Turkey, whose leaders opposed the prospect of a continuous Kurdish-controlled zone along its border. Turkey launched Operation Euphrates Shield in August 2016 to take territory from the Islamic State and prevent Kurdish forces from consolidating control. In 2018, Operation Olive Branch captured Afrin from the YPG. Turkey carried out another major cross-border operation in 2019 over Damascus’s objections, seeking to remove the YPG from its border. Russian military police later deployed as a buffer. Operation Spring Shield followed in February 2020 after Assad’s forces killed 33 Turkish soldiers in Idlib.

These campaigns linked Ankara’s domestic conflict with the PKK to the fate of northern Syria. Turkey-backed rebels contested the Azaz–Jarabulus belt where the YPG operated. Ankara also feared that Kurdish statehood in northern Iraq would affect Turkey’s own Kurdish population and the nearly two million Turkomans there. It viewed a new Kurdish administration as a possible step toward a de facto Kurdish state. In northeastern Syria, removal of the YPG from Turkey’s border remained a stated objective that Ankara had not achieved at the time of a Washington Institute assessment. A strong United States response to Turkey’s incursion, including the prospect of sanctions, made Ankara reluctant to renew operations. Turkey’s concerns thus persisted even where military action had changed control of territory.

Turkey’s defense procurement created a separate dispute with Washington. Ankara pursued Russia’s S-400 air-defense system in a deal valued at about $2.5 billion despite an American offer centered on Patriot batteries. The United States expelled Turkey from the F-35 fighter program in 2019 after the S-400 purchase, fearing that operation of F-35 aircraft alongside the Russian system could expose sensitive information about the aircraft to Russia. Turkey’s aging fighter fleet consisted mainly of F-16s acquired in the 1990s and F-4s bought in the 1970s. Israel Aerospace Industries had cooperated with Turkey on an F-4 upgrade in 1997. Ankara has since considered American, European and domestically developed aircraft as Israel and other regional states expand their air capabilities.

Relations with Israel deteriorated as Ankara built an official relationship with Hamas, a terrorist organization. Erdoğan invited Hamas leader Khaled Mashal and other senior figures to Ankara in 2006, shortly after Hamas’s election victory. The relationship worsened Turkey’s ties with Israel. They collapsed during the 2010 flotilla incident, when Israeli forces boarded a Turkish ship attempting to breach the blockade of Hamas-controlled Gaza. Israel nonetheless maintained an embassy in Ankara and a consulate general in Istanbul. President Isaac Herzog’s visit to Erdoğan’s presidential palace in March 2022 marked an attempt to restore ties, but Ankara’s continuing support for Hamas remained a central obstacle. Israel opposed giving Turkey a major role in Gaza ceasefire talks after the October 7 massacre because that support continued.

Turkey’s hostility toward Israel also has a historical dimension. Fears rooted in the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, which proposed partitioning Ottoman territory, have long shaped Turkish concern about foreign efforts to weaken the state. That outlook has influenced attitudes toward Israel and has at times carried antisemitic overtones. Recent conduct adds concrete security concerns. In 2024, Erdoğan threatened that Turkey might enter Israel as it had entered Karabakh and Libya. His statement came amid Ankara’s continued support for Hamas and its growing military role in Syria. Israel’s assessment of Turkish plans there must be read against those actions, including proposed deployments of radar, air defenses and troops, rather than treated as a response to rhetoric alone.

After the fall of Assad’s regime, Ankara negotiated a defense arrangement with Syria’s new rulers and sought positions at Syrian airbases. Turkish military teams surveyed T4, Palmyra and Hama in March 2025. Israeli aircraft struck T4 and Palmyra before a scheduled Turkish inspection, then struck T4 again in early April. Turkey’s plans for T4 included air defenses and armed drones. On August 18, 2026, Israeli aircraft destroyed the runway at Abu al-Duhur airbase in Idlib amid Turkish plans to place radar, air defenses and troops there. Ankara’s pursuit of these positions threatened to restrict Israel’s ability to act against dangers in Syrian airspace. Israel’s strikes addressed that emerging military risk.

Present day

Ankara remains Turkey’s governing center and the place where its alliances, rivalries and regional ambitions converge. Its NATO ties coexist with the consequences of the S-400 purchase; its Syria policy combines opposition to PKK-linked forces with efforts to secure a lasting military presence; and its Eastern Mediterranean policy affects Cyprus, Greece, Libya and Israel. Turkey stationed six fighter jets in the part of northern Cyprus it occupies in 2026. Ankara has also halted $10 billion in trade with Israel, according to a statement by foreign minister Hakan Fidan. These decisions show the reach of policies issued from the capital, even when their effects are felt far from the city.

Within Ankara itself, the functions of a modern capital stand alongside a much older urban history. Government buildings and diplomatic missions occupy a city whose earlier residents traded across Anatolia and maintained Jewish institutions for centuries. The surviving record traces Ankara from ancient Ancyra through Ottoman commerce to republican statehood. Its present significance lies both in that accumulated history and in the continuing power of the Turkish government based there. From fighter procurement and cross-border operations to relations with Israel and neighboring states, Ankara remains central to decisions affecting the wider Middle East.