Ulucanlar Prison Museum

Unlike Istanbul, Ankara lacks monumental examples of Byzantine, Ottoman and Baroque architecture. However, stretching from the Ottoman downtown area of Ulus to Atatürk's mausoleum and presidential mansion in Çankaya, Ankara is an open-air museum of modern Turkish history, spanning the period from the national liberation war of 1919-1922 to the present day.

Ulucanlar Prison, centrally located in Ankara’s traditional Ottoman downtown, operated as Ankara’s central prison between 1925 and 2006. Throughout its years of operation, it was notorious for its informal function as a prison for political prisoners, shedding light on an 80-year period of modern Turkish history. The prison’s former inmates span all of modern Turkey’s main political ideologies, both right-wing and left-wing, and many of them are central figures in Turkey’s political and intellectual history.

Three internationally renowned Turkish artists — the communist poet Nâzım Hikmet (1902–63), the novelist Yaşar Kemal (1923–2015), author of Memed, My Hawk, and the Kurdish actor and director Yılmaz Güney (1937–84), who won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival for his film Yol in 1982 — all served sentences in this prison, alongside many other famous politicians and intellectuals.

Güney's 1983 film Duvar which depicts the poor humanitarian conditions in Turkish prisons during the military regime established in 1980, was inspired by Ulucanlar Prison. This was at a time when the 1978 film Midnight Express, which featured an American imprisoned in Turkey, had prompted diplomatic protests from the Turkish government.

As well as housing many political prisoners, Ulucanlar Prison was the site of some of the most significant executions throughout its years of operation, until Turkey abolished the death penalty in 2004. The prison witnessed the execution of leaders of the Committee of Union and Progress (the ruling party of the Ottoman Empire from 1913 to 1918) on charges of attempting to assassinate Atatürk in 1926; two military officers in 1964 following a failed coup d’état; three leftist university students who became national symbols after their execution in 1973; and numerous other left- and right-wing political activists by the military regime installed in 1980.

The last execution was that of Levon Ekmekçiyan, a militant of Lebanese-Armenian origin, in 1983. He had carried out a terrorist attack at Ankara’s Esenboğa Airport, leaving nine dead.

Following the abolition of the death penalty in Turkey in 2004, the gallows from the former prison can now be seen on display in an iron cage.