Ankara

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The City Gave Away Its Goats and Kept Its Clock

The Angora goat takes its name from Ankara, which was called Angora until 1930. So does mohair, the fibre it produces. White goats with long ringlets have grazed the plateaux around the city for at least two thousand years, and European travellers were writing about them from the 1550s.

For centuries the Ottoman state restricted their export, because the monopoly was worth protecting.

It did not hold.

In 1838 Sultan Mahmud II sent twelve wethers and one female to South Africa. The males were castrated deliberately, so that no rival herd could be established. It was a reasonable precaution and it failed. In 1849 Sultan Abdülmecid I gave seven does and two bucks to an American adviser — the first import to the United States. Further consignments followed, some six or seven hundred head in total, with final large shipments from South Africa of 148 goats in 1904 and 117 bucks in 1925.

By the 1960s the United States had over five million Angora goats, with more than 90% of American mohair produced in Texas. South Africa now holds roughly a quarter of the world's Angora goats and has overtaken the US in production.

Turkish academic accounts describe the outcome plainly: Anatolia, the cradle of the breed, lost its position in an industry that carries its capital's name.

The clock: and in the same century, Ankara gave the country something it has never given up.

On 26 December 1925 the Grand National Assembly in Ankara passed Law 697, abolishing the Ottoman alaturka system — in which the day began at sunset and every clock in the country had to be corrected every few days — and adopting the international 24-hour clock from 1 January 1926.

Istanbul lived with the consequences; its mosque timekeeping rooms, the muvakkithanes, were only formally closed in 1952. But the decision was made here.

Ankara sits at about 33° east, on UTC+3, a zone built for the 45th meridian — leaving the city roughly 48 minutes ahead of its own sun. Since 2016 Türkiye has stayed on that offset permanently, with no seasonal change at all.

The city renamed itself in 1930. The world still calls the goat Angora.

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