Ankaraculture & etiquette

The national rule still applies: any mahalle where foreigners exceed 20% of the population is closed to new residence-permit address registration, and a lease inside one sinks your ikamet. Ankara has far fewer closed neighbourhoods than Istanbul, and the concentration is in Altındağ rather than in the districts newcomers actually target. Confirm the exact mahalle against the current Göç İdaresi announcement anyway — the list moves.

Lira inflation is high enough that a rent quoted in TRY today is a different rent in real terms in six months. Keep savings in USD or EUR in a döviz sub-account and convert only what you're about to spend. Exchange offices (döviz) beat bank counters, and both beat Esenboğa airport by a wide margin.

Every ministry, the Göç İdaresi headquarters, the NVİ, the GİB and roughly 130 foreign embassies sit inside Ankara. Errands that mean a flight and a hotel for someone in İzmir — a home-country police certificate, an apostille, a consular signature, a notarised translation the embassy will accept — are a metro ride here. Batch them into one week rather than making four separate trips.

At 938 m on the Anatolian steppe, Ankara gets snow that settles for weeks and nights well below freezing, while summers are hot but dry rather than muggy. Bring or buy proper boots and a coat, ask what a flat's heating is (doğalgaz kombi versus shared central heating changes your winter bill enormously), and check whether snow tyres are mandated by the valilik that season.

M1/M2/M3 through-run as a single 46 km line from Koru in the west to OSB-Törekent in the far northwest, M4 climbs to Keçiören, and Ankaray crosses from AŞTİ to Dikimevi. Everything meets at Kızılay. That covers a lot of the city and almost none of Gaziosmanpaşa or the eastern half of Çankaya — so unlike Istanbul, plenty of people here genuinely do drive, and traffic is bad but not Istanbul-bad.

Ankara is a working government and defence city, not a tourist one. Outside the universities, the embassy belt in Gaziosmanpaşa and the tech campuses, English gets thin fast. Learning numbers, 'anlamadım' and how to read a queue ticket buys you more here in a fortnight than it would in Istanbul in six months.