Ankara Ethnography Museum

This early republican museum occupies a domed white marble building on a hill in central Ankara, opened in the 1920s as one of the young nation's first cultural institutions. Its galleries display Turkish and Anatolian folk arts, including carpets, costumes, weaponry, calligraphy, woodcarving and traditional crafts spanning the Seljuk and Ottoman periods. For years the founder of the republic lay in a temporary resting place here before his mausoleum was completed. The elegant structure and its collections shaped a national cultural identity.