By Bob Van Leer

  (ANKARA, TURKEY, June 9, 1987) - Our party today left Istanbul aboard a Turkish Airways (THY) Boeing 727 for the 40 minute flight to Ankara.

  The security was tighter than anything we have run across before. All our baggage, including that checked aboard, was run through an x-ray. We were all patted down and then went through and received boarding passes.

  Our guide asked me to collect all pen knives from our party and these we put in a separate bag and they were checked also. They were not allowed to be carried in the passenger cabin. Then, just before we boarded the plane, our baggage went through another x-ray and we were patted down again. Finally, just before boarding the plane, we had to identify each piece of our checked baggage. One of our party said the measures gave her a greater sense of security.

  Ankara is a city of 2.5 million in a population center of 4.5 million. The city is on the high Anatolian plateau, 850 meters elevation. This area grows wheat and it is called the breadbasket of Turkey. It is still spring here and the whole country is green with wheat. Ankara was a city of just 75,000 people until 1923 when the new leader of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, designated it as the new capital of Turkey.

  Ataturk ruled from 1923 to his death in 1938 and modernized Turkey. A half century later his influence is still as if he died last year. A monument in his honor is the central feature of this city. In it are his mausoleum and a museum dedicated to him which includes mementoes, even to his clothing. He made Turkey a secular state, separating government and religion, even though Turkey is 98 percent Muslim. He changed the country from Arabic script to the Roman alphabet. The two main cross streets in Ankara are name after him.

  Turkey is not a wealthy country. The average annual income is $1100, according to our guide, for a 40-hour work week. With this income, he said that 90 percent of transportation is by bus. This is hard to believe, though seeing the traffic jams.

  Ataturk came to power after driving the Greeks from Turkey. Turkey sided with Germany in World War I, which destroyed the Ottoman Empire. A Greek army was driven out by Ataturk and a republic proclaimed. In this are more of the seeds of the emnity between Greece and Turkey. Greece won its war of independence from Turkey and, a century later, Turkey won its war of independence from Greece.

  So far, the Turks do not seem to have the hysteria against Greece that we found in Greece against Turkey.

  After checking into our hotel, we toured Ataturk's mausoleum and then went to the museum of Anatolian history, which makes the Greek and Roman ruins seem modern by comparison. Our guide says the first known settlement in the world was in Turkey about 7000 years ago. There were highly developed civilizations here thousands of years B.C. Another stop showed us the ruins of a Roman temple, later converted to a Christian church and now part of the grounds of Muslim mosque.

  Part of our group took a side trip to Izmir to visit a NATO base and they are to join us tomorrow of a visit to the U.S. Embassy where we are to be greeted by the ambassador and briefed by the U.S. Information Agency.