A Rumeli City in Anatolia: Environmental nostalgia in the design of early republican Ankara

Abstract: This article explores how nostalgia for familiar landscapes shaped Ankara’s urban design in the 1920s and 1930s. While the new Turkish capital was built with the explicit aim of signaling a break from the Ottoman past and marking the Turkish nation-state’s break ties southeastern Europe, memories of Istanbul and of the Balkan environments nevertheless influenced many of the political and cultural elites responsible its development. It draws on the pages of La Turquie Kemaliste , a prominent propaganda magazine of Turkey’s single-party era aimed at foreign readership, as well as on memoirs by prominent Kemalist figures such as Falih Rıfkı Atay and Şevket Süreyya Aydemir to highlight ways in which nostalgia and “place memories” affected city planning, regional development, and conservations policy centered on Ankara.