Ankara rose to prominence as the staging ground of the Turkish Independence War the nationalists waged to liberate the country from post-WWI occupation. In 1923, upon victory, the nationalists proclaimed Ankara as the capital of the new republic they founded. Building a modern capital was central to their efforts to reinvent Turkey, pronouncing a definitive break with the Ottoman past. As a minor provincial seat, which unlike Istanbul had few Ottoman institutional landmarks that could compete with or undermine the republican vision, Ankara was particularly suitable for this purpose. Moreover, in the preceding decades, Ankara had endured a string of disasters, experienced economic decline, and suffered significant population loss. The forced deportation of Armenians—with catastrophic consequences—during WWI, followed by the exchange of Orthodox Christians with Greece had decisively changed Ankara’s demographic makeup. Despite their ambivalences about the specifics of this process, the nationalists mistrusted non-Muslim communities as potentially divisive and saw in their departures an opportunity for reinforcing a sense of national homogeneity. Bereft of its diversity, they saw Ankara as a tabula rasa on which to inscribe the structural transformation of the state. Ankara, however, was far from being a tabula rasa. Consequently, the making of Turkey’s new capital was as much a process of physical and symbolic construction as it was of destruction. While in the aftermath of WWI, few non-Muslims remained to speak of Ankara’s multi-cultural history, the landscape they left behind continued to invoke their presence even in their absence. The nationalists considered the persistence of these diverse cultural artifacts as vessels of alternative memories that were incompatible with the unifying narratives of nationalism they promoted. Consequently, they moved to appropriate and reinscribe public and private sites pertaining to Ankara’s non-Muslim communities with new uses and meanings. A substantial portion of new development in Ankara occurred on land seized from these entities, erasing the physical traces of their existence. These deliberate acts were intended to create a homogeneous landscape by eliminating, if necessary by force, the sites and practices that belonged to the heterogeneous mosaic of cultures inherited from the Empire. Importantly, the continued omission of this process of destruction, concomitant to the process of creation, replicated the official silence on this matter. This oversight has long afflicted Turkish historiography, masking the overwhelming frictions during this profound transformation and their long-term consequences.