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Museum honors goats' central role in Ankara history

An exhibit in an Ankara museum explores Turkey's legendary mohair and the declining number of Angora goats that produce it.
A girl touches the snout of a Angora Goat at the Nampo Harvest Day Expo outside Bothaville on May 15, 2018. - Nampo Harvest Day, the biggest privately owned agriculture Expo in the southern Hemisphere, takes place from May 15 to 18 May 2018 outside Bothaville. (Photo by WIKUS DE WET / AFP)        (Photo credit should read WIKUS DE WET/AFP/Getty Images)
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View of Ankara,” a huge painting in the permanent collection of Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, is one of the rare landscapes that show Ankara before it became the capital of modern Turkey. Drawn in the 18th century, the artwork uses hues of brown to capture daily life in Ankara’s citadel, featuring the famous Angora goats, mohair weavers and caravans of tradesmen.

The painting is currently on loan to an exhibition called “Weaving History: Mystery of a City, Sof” at the Rahmi Koc Museum of Ankara. The exhibition, which focuses on “sof” — the local word for mohair, made from the wool of Angora goats — is organized by the Vehbi Koc Ankara Research Center. Both the center and the museum are a homage by the Koc family to the city where the family’s patriarch, Vehbi Koc, started building his business empire in the young republic in a simple grocer’s shop. The family is one of Turkey's largest industrial dynasties and a determined patron of the arts.

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