Living in Beytepe, Ankara

Beytepe is a neighbourhood on the western edge of Ankara's Çankaya district, and it is best understood as a university quarter. It is built around the Beytepe Campus of Hacettepe University - a sprawling site of around six million square metres of green land and woodland, opened in 1975, that holds most of the university's faculties: Engineering, Science, Letters, Education, Economics and Administrative Sciences, Fine Arts, Law and more. The campus is famous for its scale and its trees: a large planted forest with running and cycling trails wraps around the academic buildings. Beytepe began as a small village on the southwestern outskirts of the capital, and the campus arrived first; the dense residential neighbourhood grew up around it afterwards.

Who lives here

Heavily young and academic, but increasingly mixed. The defining presence is the Hacettepe community - students, postgraduates, lecturers and university staff - and the rooms and shared flats around the campus reflect that. Alongside them, Beytepe has filled with families drawn by the newer apartment blocks and the relative space compared with central Ankara. The neighbourhood's growth tells the story: it had only about 1,400 residents in 2007 and has since climbed past 20,000, one of the fastest-growing pockets in Çankaya. The result is a younger, newer-built quarter than the older central neighbourhoods, with a strong student flavour set into an expanding residential grid.

What it's like during the day

Green and campus-centred. The single biggest feature of daily life here is the Hacettepe woodland: the Beytepe Campus doubles as an enormous park, and its forest trails are used for trekking, running and mountain biking by students and residents alike. Off campus, the residential streets are a mix of newer apartment blocks and the supporting fabric of a university district - cafés, çay houses, photocopy and stationery shops, bookshops, cheap eateries and small markets serving the student crowd. It is calmer and more spread out than the central Çankaya neighbourhoods; you trade the dense old-town bustle for trees, slopes and newer buildings.

What it's like in the evening

Quieter than the centre, and student-paced. Evening life clusters around the campus gates and the cafés and casual restaurants that serve the university crowd - coffee, casual food, study spots that stay open late in term time. This is not a big nightlife district: for bars, meyhane tables and clubs, residents take the metro into Kızılay, the city's central hub, which is a direct ride away. Out of term, Beytepe is noticeably calmer. The trade-off is a residential, lower-key evening atmosphere, with the lively centre only a metro trip rather than a walk away.

Getting around

The key asset is the M2 metro (the Kızılay-Çayyolu line), which has a station serving Beytepe along the Eskişehir Yolu corridor. The line links the western university belt straight into Kızılay, Ankara's central interchange, in roughly 25 minutes, where you can change onto the rest of the metro network. From the metro, Hacettepe runs free shuttle services into the large Beytepe campus, since the academic buildings sit back from the main road. EGO buses and dolmuş minibuses fill in the rest, and you pay for public transport with a Başkentkart. The neighbourhood is hilly and spread out, so for anything beyond your immediate block the metro and buses do most of the work.

Universities nearby

This is the whole point of Beytepe. Hacettepe University's Beytepe Campus is the anchor, with the bulk of the university's faculties on site. Just a few kilometres away sits Bilkent University, and the vast wooded campus of Middle East Technical University (METU / ODTÜ) lies along the same western corridor - all strung together by the M2 metro and the Eskişehir Yolu axis. This concentration of major campuses on the western side of Ankara is what makes Beytepe and its neighbours such a dense student-housing belt, and it is why demand for rooms tightens sharply at the start of each academic year in the autumn.

Eating and shopping

The everyday scene is functional and student-priced rather than upscale. Around the campus and along the residential streets you'll find cafés, breakfast spots, kebapçı, bakeries, greengrocers, pharmacies and small supermarkets geared to students and families. For bigger shopping, the neighbouring Çayyolu-Ümitköy corridor further out on the M2 has large shopping malls and supermarkets, while central Çankaya's shops and the dense café streets of Kızılay and Bahçelievler are a short metro ride in the other direction. Prices in Beytepe itself are reasonable by Ankara standards, in keeping with its student base.

When NOT to pick it

If you want to be in the thick of the city, Beytepe is not central - it sits on the western edge, well outside the old core, and a real night out means taking the metro into Kızılay. It is hilly and spread out, so getting around depends heavily on the metro, shuttles and buses; without them, distances feel long. The neighbourhood is also strongly tied to the university calendar, which means it can feel quiet out of term and that rooms tighten and rents rise just as the academic year begins. Beytepe is at its best for students, postgraduates and young academics who want to live close to Hacettepe, on the M2 metro, with newer flats, plenty of green space and more room than the crowded centre - and who don't mind that the liveliest nightlife is a metro ride away.