Ankara’s Garden of Turkic Memories

ANKARA (Turkiye): In the heart of Türkiye’s capital, a visitor can now walk through centuries of Turkic history without crossing a national border.

Inaugurated during the 13th summit of the Organization of Turkic States (OTS), held in Ankara on October 29 and 30, the sprawling Beştepe Nation’s Forest brings together ancient inscriptions from Mongolia, traditional Central Asian tents, miniature historical monuments and cultural symbols representing the Turkic world.

The park, located near Türkiye’s Presidential Complex, was inaugurated by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in the presence of visiting Turkic leaders, giving the summit’s vision of shared history, cultural identity and cooperation a permanent physical expression.

The setting in the garden is unusual. Instead of glass cabinets and museum corridors, history unfolds along walking paths, beneath trees and across landscaped lawns. A turn in the pathway brings a visitor face to face with an eighth-century inscription. Another leads towards a traditional Central Asian tent. Beyond it, gardens and miniature monuments recall civilisations that once connected the Mediterranean with the mountains and deserts of Inner Asia.

The newly opened Beştepe Nation’s Forest, incorporating the Turkic States Civilisations Park, gives physical expression to a shared historical identity that Türkiye has increasingly placed at the centre of its cultural diplomacy.

For a visitor from Kashmir, the experience carries another layer of meaning. The Turkic world represented here does not end in Central Asia. Its historical connections extend across the Karakoram into Ladakh, the Kashmir Valley and the Indian subcontinent, where Turkic merchants, soldiers, scholars and dynasties left enduring marks on language, architecture and society.

Among those attending the inauguration were Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, Uzbekistan’s President Shavkat Mirziyoyev, Kyrgyzstan’s President Sadyr Japarov and Turkmenistan’s President Serdar Berdimuhamedow.

Spread over 645,000 square metres, approximately the size of 90 football fields, the park combines three principal cultural attractions: Bayraktepe, Civilisations Park and the Organization of Turkic States Cultural Village.

Together, they contain 32 miniature replicas of historical monuments and seven replicas of the Orkhon inscriptions.

The cultural village displays the flags of eight countries, historical and cultural exhibits associated with seven countries, and traditional tents representing six countries. The monuments are intended to offer visitors an introduction to the enormous geographical expanse of the Turkic world.

The miniature collection includes some of Türkiye’s best-known landmarks: Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, the Selimiye Mosque in Edirne, the Sümela Monastery near Trabzon, the ancient archaeological site of Göbeklitepe and the Çanakkale Martyrs’ Memorial.

These structures represent different periods of Anatolia’s history, including civilisations that preceded the arrival of Turkic peoples.

The Orkhon inscriptions occupy a particularly important place in the cultural landscape.

Originally erected in the eighth century in present-day Mongolia, they commemorate rulers and statesmen of the early Turkic Khaganate. The monuments are among the oldest substantial surviving examples of written Turkic.

The Turkish Language Association commissioned replicas of inscriptions associated with Kül Tigin, Bilge Khagan and Tonyukuk for the Ankara project.

Their inclusion gives the park a historical depth that goes beyond the Ottoman Empire, which is often the most familiar expression of Turkic history to audiences in South Asia.

The inscriptions recall an era when Turkic political power was centred in Inner Asia, centuries before the Seljuks entered Anatolia or the Ottomans established their state.

For visitors from Central Asia, the monuments evoke a common linguistic and historical inheritance. For others, they provide a reminder that the political geography of Eurasia was once very different from the borders drawn on modern maps.

Forgotten Turkic Road to Ladakh

Standing among the Central Asian exhibits, it is difficult not to think of another historical route, one that once connected the Turkic cities of Yarkand and Kashgar with Leh in Ladakh.

For centuries, Ladakh served as a commercial bridge between the Indian subcontinent, Tibet and Central Asia.

Caravans carrying silk, wool, carpets, tea, precious stones and other commodities travelled across the Karakoram mountains, linking Leh with Yarkand, Kashgar and the trading centres of Chinese Turkestan.

These connections were not merely commercial. They also brought languages, food habits, religious ideas and families into contact.

Ladakhi historian Abdul Ghani Sheikh, in his study Ladakh’s Relations with Central Asia, documents how Central Asian influences became embedded in the region’s everyday life.

He identifies several place names along the old Leh-Yarkand route that preserve memories of these contacts, including Horlam, meaning the Turkic route, Horkhar, associated with a Turkic fort, and Hori Brangsa, recalling a Turkic encampment.

Even Daulat Beg Oldi, the remote location near the Karakoram Pass that now figures prominently in the military geography of the India-China border, carries an association with the old caravan trade. The place that today appears in military reports as a strategic outpost was once part of a network through which merchants moved between South and Central Asia.

The historical relationship between the Turkic world and the wider Kashmir region is also reflected in the subcontinent’s political history. Merchants, Sufi scholars and artisans moved between Kashmir and Central Asian centres such as Bukhara, Samarkand and Kashgar. These exchanges contributed to the region’s religious, intellectual and material culture.

The influence of Persianate civilisation was particularly strong, and it frequently overlapped with the political and cultural worlds of Turkic dynasties.

Green Monument to Turkic World

The Ankara project is as much about landscape as it is about history.

According to official figures, the forest contains approximately 750,000 trees and shrubs, including 410,000 newly planted saplings. There are 203 plant species, including broadleaved trees, conifers and shrubs.

The complex includes 285,000 square metres of lawns, along with specialised gardens devoted to forest fruits, medicinal plants and aromatic vegetation. A lavender garden contains 19,000 plants spread over 5,000 square metres.

Another garden contains ten olive trees estimated to be 300 years old. One of the most remarkable exhibits is a monumental oak tree known as Koca Meşe, believed to be approximately 450 years old.

Nearby, an exhibition of fossilised wood estimated to be 24 million years old introduces visitors to a natural history vastly older than the human civilisations celebrated elsewhere in the park.

A few minutes' walk can take visitors from geological history to the earliest written records of the Turkic peoples, and then towards monuments representing the Ottoman and modern Turkish periods. The forest also contains more than 19 kilometres of roads and walking paths, a 2.2-kilometre cycling track and a one-kilometre running track.

A 315-metre artificial stream, a six-tiered cascading pool and a waterfall descending through 26 steps provide additional landscaped attractions.

Children's playgrounds, sports courts, a forest school and open-air amphitheatres have been incorporated into the complex.

Three playgrounds carry the names of personalities associated with Ottoman history: Hezarfen Ahmed Çelebi, remembered for his legendary attempt at human flight; Barbaros Hayreddin Pasha, the celebrated naval commander; and Evliya Çelebi, whose seventeenth-century travel accounts remain an important source for the history of the Ottoman world.

The names turn ordinary recreational spaces into reminders of the past.

A large map of Türkiye has been created using 44,000 saplings, while another living mosaic, representing the Century of Türkiye, contains 25,000 saplings.

The cultural geography represented in the park is considerably larger than the membership of the Organization of Turkic States.

Türkiye, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan are full members of the organisation. Turkmenistan, Hungary and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus participate as observers, although Northern Cyprus is recognised as an independent state only by Türkiye.

Large Turkic-speaking populations also live within Russia and China.

In Russia, they include Tatars, Bashkirs, Chuvash, Sakha, and several communities of Siberia and the North Caucasus. The North Caucasian republics, including Dagestan, are particularly diverse, with Turkic-speaking communities living alongside peoples belonging to other linguistic traditions. In China, the Uyghurs of Xinjiang are among the largest predominantly Muslim Turkic communities outside the independent Turkic states.

Their circumstances illustrate the political complexities that lie beneath the idea of a common Turkic civilisation.

What makes Beştepe Nation’s Forest different from a conventional public park is the deliberate interweaving of nature, history and contemporary diplomacy.

Its pathways do not simply connect gardens and recreational facilities. They link different historical periods and geographical regions.

A visitor encounters the early Turkic khaganates through the Orkhon inscriptions, the Ottoman centuries through architectural monuments, and the modern Turkic republics through their flags and cultural exhibits.

For a Kashmiri visitor, the journey also recalls the old caravan routes of Ladakh and the Central Asian connections that once made Leh an important trading centre.

Those routes have largely disappeared from everyday life.

Modern borders, military confrontations and restrictions on cross-border movement have transformed the Karakoram from a commercial passage into one of Asia’s most heavily contested frontiers.

The old road between Leh and Yarkand, once travelled by merchants and pilgrims, is no longer an active international trading route.

While Türkiye is attempting to revive historical connections across the Turkic world, some of the routes that once connected Central Asia with South Asia remain closed. The park celebrates a shared past, but it also invites reflection on how much of that interconnected world has been lost.

In its official description, the General Directorate of Forestry presents Beştepe as a place where visitors can discover nature, experience culture and leave a legacy for future generations. That aspiration is visible in the arrangement of its gardens, monuments and educational spaces.

But its deeper significance may lie in the questions it raises about identity, memory and the political boundaries of the modern world.

The trees planted by Turkic leaders during the inauguration will take years to mature. The political project associated with them may take even longer. For now, the newly opened forest offers a walk-through history, from the ancient inscriptions of Mongolia to the cultural landscapes of Anatolia, with distant echoes of the caravan trails that once connected Central Asia with Kashmir and Ladakh.