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Museum of the War of Independence

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Mutt
Mutt
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4 out of 5
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Where it all began

  • May 21, 2009
  • Rated 4 of 5 by Mutt from Ankara, Turkey
Where it all began

The squat little Ottoman era schoolhouse that sits unassumingly amidst the hustle and bustle of downtown Ankara on the crossroads of Ulus Meydani in the shadow of the mighty Ankara Citadel and under the ever watchful gaze of the Grey Wolf’s enormous equestrian monument seems an unlikely setting for the founding of a nation but nonetheless it was the provisional parliament convened here on April 23, 1920 that proclaimed the modern republic of Turkey on October 29, 1923 and continued to sit until 1925.

Entrance to the museum is via a shoddy little hut around the back where after purchasing a ticket and undergoing a desultory security check you will be ushered towards the unimposing main entrance where only the rusting remains of a large field gun gives a hint to the momentous events of the nations history that were played out in the cramped little offices and assembly rooms that lie within.

Upon entering the first rooms visited off of the long ornate corridor that runs the short length of a building is the prayer room which reminds one of the ever present Islamic underpinnings of the great secular state the Grey Wolf set out to found and his curiously contrasting private office where all the actual founding took place and which taken together give one of the finest insights into the schizophrenic nature of the nation that continues to dog it to this day.

Across the corridor an ornate board room remains laid out for the original delegates whose brief biogs are detailed in Turkish whilst in the adjoining rooms are the tables upon which the 1923 Turkish Declaration of Independence and the 1919 Congress of Sivas that preceded it were drafted and signed, all of which are commemorated by a lovely little tapestry and numerous paintings of the key events that line the walls.

Re-crossing the corridor one enters the cramped but atmospheric old school room where the delegates crammed themselves into the diminutive school desks watched over by the blue-eyed gaze of the Grey Wolf himself, whose presence in now represented by a well polished bust in pride of place and a video screen showing a melodramatic docudrama-style re-enactment of the events with impassioned Turkish actors playing out the parts of their founding fathers.

Beyond this a couple of dusty exhibition rooms display a vast array of the somewhat primitive looking weaponry wielded by the Turks in their anti-imperialistic War of Independence alongside Turkish language captioned photographs and personal artefacts of some of the more memorable patriots who deployed from their headquarters here to forge this curious new nation but by this point it really is all over bar the shooting.

Not one of the world’s great museums but there are worse ways to waste an hour in the somewhat seedy heart of the city.

From journal Ankara: One Man’s Dream…

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