From the Orkhon steppe of Ötüken to the bare plateau of Ankara, the cities where the Turkic state has held its throne for a thousand years. In each, the trace of a dynasty, the weariness of a capital, the stone of a new beginning.
17 capitals · a thousand yearsMongolia · Orkhon-Selenga basin
The centre held sacred by the steppe Turkic states. Not a city but a homeland — the country of the Orkhon river, where the khagan’s tent and army were pitched. The inscriptions of Kül Tigin and Bilge Khagan were raised on this soil.
— Wikimedia CommonsMongolia · Orkhon Valley (Khar Balgas)
The first great walled Turkic city — stone ramparts and earthen palaces raised on the open steppe. It rose as the official capital of Manichaeism; its walls climbed to twenty-five metres. The Kyrgyz razed it in 840.
— Wikimedia CommonsKyrgyzstan · Chuy Valley (Burana site)
The central capital of the first great Turkic state to embrace Islam. Yūsuf Khāṣṣ Ḥājib wrote the Kutadgu Bilig here in 1069 and presented it to the Kara-Khanid khan — the foundational monument of Turkic political thought rose from this city.
— Wikimedia CommonsAfghanistan · Ghazni Province
In the reign of Sultan Mahmud, Ghazni was reckoned the capital of the world. Gold, marble and scholars carried back from the Indian campaigns piled up here; Firdawsī recited the Shāhnāma at this court, Bīrūnī wrote his Kitāb al-Hind in this city. The first imperial laboratory of the Turko-Islamic synthesis.
— Wikimedia CommonsIran · Isfahan Province
Taken by Tughril Beg in 1051, the city became the seat of the Great Seljuks when Malikshāh moved the imperial centre here from Rayy. Malikshāh and his vizier Niẓām al-Mulk founded colleges here and were buried here. Sanjar moved the centre to Merv in 1118; the Friday Mosque took on its four-īwān courtyard plan in the Seljuk age.
— Wikimedia CommonsTurkmenistan · Konye-Urgench
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The capital of the Khwarazmshahs and the northern node of the Silk Road. Its people held out against the Mongol siege for several months; in 1221 the city was destroyed. The Mongols broke the dykes of the Oxus and left the whole place under water.
— Wikimedia CommonsTürkiye · Central Anatolia
The first Turkic capital founded in Anatolia. Under ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Kayqubād I, architecture, poetry and Sufism reached their height. Mawlānā Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī came here, lived here, and was buried here; the Mathnawī was written in the dust of this city.
— Wikimedia CommonsRussia · lower Volga, Akhtuba channel (Selitrennoye and Tsarev ruins)
The Golden Horde capital founded by Batu Khan on the Volga, which grew into a true city under Berke Khan. With Berke’s conversion to Islam it filled with mosques, colleges and caravanserais; by the mid-fourteenth century its population is recorded at 75,000. Timur burnt and sacked it in the winter of 1395–96.
— Wikimedia CommonsUzbekistan · Zarafshan Valley
The city Timur made his capital, gathering scholars and craftsmen to it from many lands. The Bibi-Khanym Mosque, the tombs of the Shāh-i Zinda and the Ulugh Beg Madrasa on the Registan are works of the Timurid age. His grandson Ulugh Beg built his observatory here.
— Wikimedia CommonsAfghanistan · Herat Province
The centre of post-Timurid civilisation. The mosque of Shāhrukh's consort Gawhar Shād, the court of Husayn Bayqara, the ghazals of Jāmī, the miniatures of Bihzād, the Chagatai of ʿAlī Shīr Nawāʾī — all of this exploded in a single generation of this city. The Florence of the East.
— Wikimedia CommonsIran · East Azerbaijan
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The city that knew its brightest days under the Ilkhan Ghāzān, and later served as the seat of the Aq Qoyunlu Uzun Ḥasan and of Shah Ismāʿīl. After Çaldıran (1514) Selim I entered the city, and the Ottomans took Tabriz again several times in the years that followed. The Safavid capital moved away from it in the second half of the sixteenth century.
— Wikimedia CommonsTürkiye · Bilecik, north-west Anatolia
The frontier settlement where a state began. The town that Ertuğrul Gazi and Osman Gazi made their home, and the first seat of administration under Osman. The tomb of Ertuğrul Gazi stands here; Osman Gazi’s body was laid here first and later taken to Bursa.
— Wikimedia CommonsTürkiye · Marmara region, foot of Mt Uludağ
The first true Ottoman capital. The tombs of Orhan Gazi, Murad I and Yıldırım Bayezid are the childhood stones of the state. The Green Mosque, the Green Tomb and the Ulu Cami — the architectural laboratory where Seljuk memory became Ottoman settlement.
— Wikimedia CommonsTürkiye · Thrace, the three-rivers crossing
The Ottoman capital that opened the gate to Europe. From Murad I to the boyhood of Fātih, the state was governed from here; from here Mehmed II rode out to Constantinople. Two centuries later, Mimar Sinan presented his ripest work — the Selimiye — not to another city but to this former capital.
— Wikimedia CommonsTürkiye · Two continents, three seas
The Ottoman capital for four hundred and sixty-nine years, the heart of an empire that ruled across three continents. From the conquest of Fātih to the departure of Vahideddin, here the decisions were taken, the documents drawn, the buildings raised. From Topkapı to Dolmabahçe, the chain of a memory.
— Wikimedia CommonsIndia · banks of the Yamuna
The Turko-Mongol capital that Bābur founded, Akbar enlarged, and Shāh Jahān rebuilt as his own. A world-city raised on Indian soil by a dynasty that still spoke Chagatai — a memory that enters through the gate of the Red Fort and ends in the courtyard of the Jama Masjid.
— Wikimedia CommonsTürkiye · Central Anatolian plateau
The city through which the empire became a republic. When a new beginning was wanted, separate from the dynastic memory of Istanbul, this ancient citadel of the bare plateau was chosen. From Mustafa Kemal's study to the parliament of today, a young capital of one hundred years.
— Wikimedia CommonsThe otağ moves, the capital remains. When a throne shifts, it leaves behind not a city alone, but a memory.