Ankara: kalbimdesin.

"The best thing about Ankara? Well, that would be how fast you can leave it". - hoary Turkish witticism

The first time I heard that I was standing on the top floor of AŞTİ, which (if memory serves) stands for "Ankara Şehrinin Terminal İstasyonu", or something like that. AŞTİ is a triple-leveled bus station, the likes of which I'd never seen before or since; long into the dead of night, hundreds of busses depart merrily for the cultured, glittering Aegean cities to the west, northwest to the Big Meat on a Stick herself, İstanbul, to the lush fecundity of the Karadeniz, or the Black Sea, to the searing heat and pressing antiquity of the Southeast and to the remotest towns in snow-shrouded Eastern Anatolia, in the shadow of Ararat. One of my friends had brought me to the station so that I wouldn't get royally raped for the ticket to Antalya; that, and I would have never taken the right minibus and would most likely have ended up in two day's time in Damascus, betrothed to livestock. He stood next to me as a miniature Anatolian pageant unfolded in front of us as the people began to cram inappropriately-sized luggage into hopelessly small overhead compartments. "Hmph", my friend said, wrinkling his nose at their antics. "I'm surprised someone's not trying to smuggle a goddamned goat onto there." He turned his gaze towards Ankara, the country's second largest city, the capital, and, at that point, my home for more than two months. He snorted in disgust. "I hate it here. I hate it here so bad I could cry." When I pressed him for an explanation, I got the same response as I'd gotten hundreds of times before when my Turkish friends began to whine like sodomized poodles about their exile in the city while going to school. "There's no sea", they weep in unison. Of course, far be it from me to explain to some of them that, indeed, their own hometowns (Konya, Adana, Elazığ and Diyarbakır) were also devoid of pelagic delight. They'd come to Ankara for an education with the hopes that it would be a city of grandeur and omnipresent antiquity, like İstanbul, or one of waving palm trees, culture and elegant refinement, like İzmir. In Ankara, they found a brash, poorly designed city that constantly defies conventional notions of what a capital city should be. They see the geceköndü (squattertowns) spreading out from the city center and quietly shake their heads in horror and disgust. And, when it comes time for a holiday, the entirety of the city is abandoned to the government workers, who also secretly wish for better digs.

I have to admit: my first impressions of Ankara weren't the sauciest, because unlike some cities, Ankara doesn't pretend to be anything other than a place to live, a place to work and a seat for the government of the Turkish Republic. From the heavens above, my first glimpse of Ankara through the ovoid peephole on my Turkish Airlines flight was of a brownish smear devoid of any distinguishing characteristics on the Anatolian plateau, reaching as far as the eye could see. When I landed, the school's shuttle-driver took me through a part of Ankara that wouldn't appear on any postcard: small children feeding tethered goats, endless illegal television antennas blocking the harsh Anatolian sunlight, garbage tattering through the streets, and not a few feral canids feasting on the bounty of waste. I remember thinking: Goddamn. OK, I have enough money in my bank account for a ticket home. No problem. What the hell were you thinking? Surely heroin was involved.

After I got over the initial shock of being someplace where *gasp!* everything isn't whitewashed and antiseptic, where I'd be expected to defecate into a hole in the ground, where food is killed out back mere hours before you eat it, I was fine. In fact, I was more than fine: Ankara became a place where I felt comfortable and at ease, night and day. I knew her streets, her bazaars, and the dozens of distinct mahalleler (neighborhoods), each with a distinguished history and pleasantly sordid present. I spent quiet weekends in the shade of mosques and poking through dusty carpet shops, where apple tea was proffered in bladder-rending quantity. I got to know a population of urbanites who, one generation before, had been shepherds or rug-weavers or blacksmiths in towns so small they can only be approached by two-lane dirt back-roads.

It's been four years since I left Ankara, but scarcely a day goes by when I don't imagine for a moment that I smell the rosemary that grew under my window, or hear the aged muezzin from the local mosque crying to the faithful. I'm not sure you know what I would give to sit across the courtyard from the Kocatepe Camii, resplendantly white in the waning light of an Ankaran sunset, drinking a lemon Fanta, watching moths the size of pigeons alighting on the dome and the minarets.

I need to go back; it's been too long. Ankara: the city nobody in Turkey loves. Ankara: a city on the move, a city of immigrants, a city of history. Kalbimdesin, sevgili Ankara. Gideceğim.

(You're in my heart, my dear Ankara. I will come.)

I remain, as ever,

Demir