Murder of the Orient Express

The Orient Express began or ended, depending on your point of view, at Sirkeci Station in Istanbul. Hercule Poirot and the murderers of Victor Ratchett boarded here in 1934 in the Agatha Christie classic, and Paul Theroux disembarked here in "The Great Railway Bazaar," describing his arrival in Istanbul as "the combined shock and exhilaration of being pitched headfirst into a bazaar."

Today, Sirkeci is a pale shadow of what it must have once been, serving primarily commuters to the western suburbs. One single track is left for international trains, mainly all-stops locals to Thessalonika and Bucharest:


One waiting room is abandoned, the other nearly so:


Only the headhouse and the restaurant area give glimpses of the station's former glamour:


On the other side of the Bosphorus, Haydarpasa station, built by the Germans as the Asian terminus of the Berlin-Baghdad railway during the pre-World War I years when they were desperately wooing the Turks as allies, has survived the years in much better shape:



Trains no longer leave Haydarpasa for Baghdad or Tehran, for obvious reasons, but since they still run to all parts of Anatolian Turkey the platforms are much busier:


Both of these stations are soon to lose their trains, though, as a rail tunnel is being built beneath the Bosphorus that will bring with it two new stations at either end, and the ability to run through from Europe directly to Asia.

That means the Berlin to Baghdad railway could actually become an uninterrupted reality -- if conditions improved in Iraq, and if anyone in Germany or the countries in between cared anymore.