With several other political shifts resulted from the collapse of Ottoman Empire, the construction of Ankara as the new capital of the Turkish Republic brought dramatic changes. Since its conquest, Istanbul had been strongly identified with the Ottoman Empire; hence, the founders of the newly formed state saw establishing Ankara as the capital as a necessary break from the 450 years of the past. I claim that organization of the city and the symbolic buildings in the city was determined according to a colonial logic which aimed to classify, organize, regulate and order the subjects of the land. Rather than simply signifying a break from the former Empire, it constituted the transformation of an old rural city into a capital of the “modern” Republic. I argue that the theory of “enframing” elaborated by Timothy Mitchell is applicable to the Ankara context. I use a three-layered approach, focusing first on the mausoleum of Ataturk second on the presidential residence in Cankaya, and third, on the city of Ankara, situated in the center of Turkey, Cankaya which is at the center of Ankara, and at the heart of Cankaya, Anitkabir?the mausoleum of the founder of the state. Their positioning represent the method of ruling that is employed by the colonial forces in the colonized states, even though Turkey has never been officially colonized. This article examines the implementation of disciplinary power by using the visual techniques of calculation, division and order during the early era of the Turkish Republic in its capital. The building of new structures was not only intended to cut the historical continuity between the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic, but was also intended to create a lieux de memoire to replace people’s memories with an artificial history.