This is the eleventh part in a series about riding night trains across Europe and the Near East to Armenia — to spend some time in worlds beyond the pathological obsessions of President Donald Trump. (This week the president has been redeveloping Gaza into another Trump resort so that Palestinian children bombed out of their homes can learn to appreciate golf and casinos.”)
The Eastern Express train that connects Ankara, the capital of Turkey, with Kars, near the Georgian border. Erzurum and Kars figured in most wars between the Ottoman and Russian empires, and both fortress cities were part of the end games of the 1854 Crimean War. Photo by Matthew Stevenson.
I had been dreading the flight to Ankara, but in the end I enjoyed it. I had an empty row of seats to myself, and out the left side of the aircraft, as we were leaving Romanian air space, I had a good view of the Danube and the Black Sea coast.
Even from the air they looked like ramparts between fortress Europe and the ever-expanding Ottoman Empire. (If you have any doubts about Turkey’s emergence as a regional superpower, visit the new Istanbul Airport in Arnavutköy.)
Over the Black Sea coast, I was reminded of the coda of my 1975 trip with my father to Romania, which ended not in Bucharest but in the port city of Constanța.
We went there on an early train that must have left from Gara du Nord around 6:30 a.m. What I remember most vividly from the train is that when we ate breakfast in the dining car, all the tables were set with an open bottle of Romanian brandy.
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The other passengers in the diner were smoking, giving the rail car the stale air of a spy novel. (“Survival,” wrote John le Carré, “is an infinite capacity for suspicion.”) My father had read somewhere that Constanța was a Black Sea resort of some charm.
As we took our trains to Vienna, Budapest, and Bucharest, Constanța was held out as the plum that would come at the end of these brave old worlds. Instead, what we found there was an endless row of seaside high-rise council flats built so that the revolution could enjoy two weeks off every summer.
The beach was rocky and forlorn, and the restaurant in our hotel seemed only to serve the same pork chops, no matter what meal was being offered.
I walked around with my camera to take some pictures of the “resort,” and remember getting shooed back to our hotel by the police, who saw no reason why anyone needed souvenirs of the workers paradise.
I know Romania is now in both the European Union and NATO, but in my mind it remains a Stalinist redoubt.
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I liked the Ankara airport, because it was large, modern, and empty. It’s about an hour outside the capital city. On our approach to the runway, the plane flew over a bleak section of the Anatolian plain that was laced with endless fissures, as if earthquakes were a weekly occurrence (one reason why the Greeks, in their invasions of 1919-22, were unable to encircle the city).
No one in the customs department cared at all about my bicycle in a shrink-wrapped package. In the main lobby of the airport, I spread my tools on an empty bench and reassembled the bike, putting my clothes back into saddle bags.
I changed money at a bank kiosk and asked about transportation into the city. A man at the bank said I could take a taxi, but the price would be about $40, while a shuttle bus went to the same places and cost $3. I went with the bus.To transport my bicycle all I needed to do was remove the bags from the frame and fold the bicycle in half.
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The bus (not the newest in the fleet) was mostly empty, although I chatted with two women from Norway who were in Turkey for their holidays and asked me if I knew how they could get down to the Mediterranean coast.
I told them that buses in Turkey went everywhere and that most were modern and comfortable, and recounted how I had taken my son Charles—then 15—to Syria (before the civil war) on a night train that went from Istanbul to Adana, where we caught taxis and buses to Aleppo and finally Damascus.
Crossing the border into Syria to Aleppo (laid to waste in the civil war), the taxi driver asked if he could stuff cartons of cigarettes into our luggage, which would not be searched at the border. It allowed me to whisper to Charles a quote from the movie Airplane!: “I picked the wrong week to quit smoking…”
This time I had my bicycle, so I did not really care where the airport bus dropped me, but as we drove into the city—it took a full hour and then some—I kept noting that Ankara is nothing but steep hills and that the traffic had the frenetic look of a split atom.
Normally, in almost any city where I have taken the Brompton, there is some place to ride it safely, but as the bus ground to a halt in the crazed traffic, I began to wonder whether Ankara might be an exception.
The bus driver left me off close to Ankara Tren Gari, the main station. Behind it was my Hotel İçkale, but first I wanted to buy my train ticket on the Dogu Express, which goes from Ankara to the eastern city of Kars, not far from the Georgian and Armenian borders.
Getting from the bus stop into the station involved crossing a boulevard that had about six lanes of rushing traffic. I waited and waited for a break in the waterfall of steel, until finally I gave up and rode along the sidewalk until I came across a traffic light and crosswalk.
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The main railway station wasn’t crowded and I had no trouble finding the window where I could buy a berth on the Dogu to Erzurum, the city in eastern Turkey to which I was headed the following evening.
My dream was to book my own compartment, which on Turkish trains isn’t the luxury that it is in western Europe or the United States. I calculated that I would need to spend about $80 or so and that I would have a single bed and wash basin plus a large window through which I could take in the landscape that separates Europe from Asia Minor.
I dreamed of reading my books and looking at my many maps while the train crept east. I also knew that there would be a dining car, and I recalled that when Charles and I took the Çukurova Express from Istanbul to Adana, the chef in the dining car had told us to ignore the menu and just order from him whatever meals we might fancy. He would then serve us with a flourish at our table (where we had a non-stop backgammon game in progress, none of which I won).
Before I could realize any of these idle dreams, I first needed a ticket on the Dogu, and about that I had some concerns.
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Normally Turkish State Railways, abbreviated as TCDD, has an online booking system that works well for purchasing rail tickets in advance, but on this occasion I could not make it work. Nor could I reserve my berth on the Dogu and simply collect the ticket at the station.
From what I could tell, the train seemed to have sold out its compartments, and the best I could do was to reserve a chair in one of the second-class coaches, which didn’t fill me with Ottoman joy.
The journey from Ankara to Erzurum is almost 24 hours, and I didn’t warm to the idea of “sitting up” (to use a family expression for overnight coach travel). At the same time, for my schedule to work out in Georgia and Armenia, I had no choice but to be on the train the following day—come hell or high water.
I had only paid about $6 for my reserved second-class coach, but what I wanted now was a berth in my own compartment.
Just so that everything was clear to the ticket agent, I had translated the request into Turkish and printed out my firman, which when my turn came at the window I slid through the bars on the window, as if submitting non-negotiable demands (although every in Turkey is a negotiation).
The agent examined the request, and went off to confer with her manager, who in turn consulted the computer and made a few phone calls. It took longer than I expected.
In the end I was told that the train was almost full, and that the best I could do was to book a single berth in a compartment with four beds.
In other words, my dream of a night train to Erzurum on the Dogu Express was boiling down to something that would feel like a crowded couchette on the night train (in 1975) from Amsterdam to Vienna.
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With no alternatives, I paid $24 for my berth, collected my ticket, and biked off toward the Hotel İçkale with that sense of travel defeat that comes to me all too often (especially when I am dreaming of the crack night trains of my childhood).
At least I loved my hotel, which for $40 (the Turkish lira was in the tank) gave me a large room with a balcony, and the kindly porter brought up a cold beer from the bar.
The doorman took responsibility for my bicycle, promising to lock it to the inside luggage rack, and I did what I do at some of my travel stops, which is to empty out my bags and send off all of my clothes to be washed.
Then with my papers organized, my many maps carefully stacked on my bedside table, and my books aligned along the desktop (luckier than I, Napoleon traveled with a desk that folded out of a cart), I set off on a bike ride to take the measure of Ankara, the Anatolian village that Mustafa Kemal, aka Atatürk, converted into a seat of empire (that which is playing endless double games with the Russians over Ukraine, and in the Arab world, over Syria and Kurdistan).
