Çankaya

Every Turkish president from 1923 to 2014 governed from the same hilltop. In 1921, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk purchased a vineyard estate on Çankaya's high ground for 4,500 liras and turned it into the presidential residence of a republic that did not yet exist. The choice was costly signaling: Ankara over Istanbul, a hilltop over a palace, a vineyard over a throne room. The new republic would literally look down on the old Ottoman city from higher elevation. 'Çankaya' became Turkey's metonym for the presidency—the Turkish equivalent of 'the White House'—and the Pink Pavilion designed by Austrian architect Clemens Holzmeister in 1932 housed eleven presidents across ninety-one years.

The founder effects run deeper than architecture. The estate Atatürk purchased had belonged to Ohannes Kasabian, an Armenian jeweler whose family fled Ankara in 1915 during the Armenian Genocide. The property was confiscated under abandoned-property laws, transferred, and purchased by the founder of the republic. The Kasabian family's name remains chiselled in Armenian letters on a fountain in the museum portion of the complex—a physical trace the official narrative erases but the stone remembers. The Turkish Republic was literally built on dispossessed ground, and the founding act of the presidential district carries that founder effect forward: Çankaya's identity as a power centre rests on a property transfer that its residents do not discuss.

In 2014, Erdoğan moved the presidency to a new complex in the Beştepe neighbourhood—over 1,000 rooms, 200,000 square metres of built area, four times the size of Versailles, constructed inside Atatürk Forest Farm in defiance of court orders halting construction on protected land. The architectural vocabulary shifted from Kemalist modernist austerity to neo-Ottoman and Seljuk grandeur. This was a phase transition in Turkish governance signalled through the language of buildings: the old bower—republican, modest, secular—was replaced by a new bower so extravagant that critics called it 'Ak Saray' (White Palace), punning on Erdoğan's AKP party. Like a bowerbird constructing an ever-larger display structure, each Turkish political era builds its legitimacy claim in stone. Signal degradation followed: 'Çankaya' no longer means the presidency. The word lost its metonymic power the day the president moved out.

The district itself remains Ankara's institutional core—parliament, nearly all foreign embassies, Atatürk's mausoleum Anıtkabir, three major universities including METU and Bilkent, and a population of roughly 940,000 that swells to nearly two million during working hours. In local elections it votes 60 to 70 percent for the CHP, Atatürk's own party—a political refugium where the founder's secular ideology persists while competitive exclusion has displaced it from most of Anatolia. Çankaya is the hilltop that built a republic, lost a presidency, and kept voting for the founder's party—a district whose stone remembers what its politics cannot forget.