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Buy/gift a digital subscription Login to the Digital EditionThey once brought silk-like splendour to sultans and swept Hollywood up in a cloud of fluff. This is the story of three animals who carried Ankara’s name around the world. Thomas Roueché pays a visit to Endemik Vadi, where the city’s sleekest inhabitants are now in safe hands. Photographs by Monica Fritz
In the 1850s, the revolutionary Italian Princess Cristina Trivulzio di Belgiojoso fled Europe for the Ottoman Empire, where she bought land and established a farm. Her exile would last more than five years. After a visit to Ankara, she commented that “the goats of Ankara are the most beautiful animals that you might see: their silk, for you cannot call it wool, is most often white, sometimes reddish, grey even black; but whatever colour the silk, its delicacy, its softness and its shininess are always the same. It looks like the finest silk, waved or curled, by some newly discovered process. It is with this Ankara wool, camlet, that all sorts of stockings and mittens are made.”
The city of Ankara can boast the curious claim of being home to three endemic species, each of which is pure white: the Angora goat, the Angora cat and the Angora rabbit. To these are often added the white pigeon – famed for its love of somersaulting through the sky – and the Angora bee, which produces a milky-white honey. The result is a unique cultural patrimony, celebrated in “Endemik Vadi”(Valley of Endemic Species), a small nature reserve close to Esenboğa Airport…
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A show on food in art at the İşbank Museum of Painting and Sculpture is a veritable remembrance of times past
Known as the ‘Turkish Henri Cartier-Bresson’, Ara Güler roamed the streets, creating gritty portraits of everyday life
Visitors who climb the long flight of rock-hewn stairs to the monastery of Mar Musa al-Habashi in the Syrian Desert, whatever their faith, will find a place of serenity, a welcome, and frescoes to dazzle them
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