Ankara
Ataturk's deliberate 1923 founder effect planted Turkey's capital in Anatolian steppe—now a 5-million-person defence and governance organism directing a larger commercial body.
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk chose Ankara as capital in 1923 for precisely the reasons Istanbul would have been wrong: it was inland, defensible, ethnically Turkish, and unburdened by Ottoman imperial baggage. The decision was a deliberate founder effect—a new organism seeded in Anatolian steppe soil rather than grafted onto Byzantine roots. Ankara's population at the time was roughly 20,000. It now exceeds five million.
The city's growth traces the arc of the Turkish state itself. The grand boulevard Ataturk Bulvari runs arrow-straight from the old citadel to the modernist government quarter, a physical metaphor for the punctuated equilibrium Ataturk imposed: abolishing the caliphate, switching from Arabic to Latin script, granting women's suffrage, and relocating the capital all within a decade. Every ministry, military headquarters, and foreign embassy established in Ankara during the 1920s and 1930s created institutional path dependence that Istanbul, for all its commercial dominance, cannot reverse.
Ankara's economy orbits the state. Government employment and defence industries—including Turkish Aerospace Industries (TAI), Aselsan, and Roketsan, all headquartered in the city—form the metabolic core. The OSTİM and İvedik industrial zones host thousands of small manufacturers in a cluster pattern resembling an ant colony: individually modest firms that collectively produce significant defence and automotive output. Middle East Technical University (METU) and Bilkent University supply engineering talent, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of state investment and technical capability.
The biological tension is between Ankara as a planned political organism and Istanbul as a commercial one. Istanbul generates roughly 30% of Turkey's GDP; Ankara generates perhaps 9%. Yet Ankara controls the regulatory apparatus, military procurement, and diplomatic relationships. It is the brain of the Turkish state—smaller than the commercial body it directs, but irreplaceable in a centralised system where political power still outweighs market forces.