Haydarpasa Train Station

This guide to Haydarpasa Train Station in Istanbul opens with a 1917 explosion that tore the roof off a terminal Germany had built just eight years before as the front door to an unfinished empire. You'll hear how architects Otto Ritter and Helmuth Cuno raised a castle-like station on more than a thousand piles driven into the Bosphorus, meant as the Istanbul end of Kaiser Wilhelm's rail line toward Baghdad, and why that plan set Britain and Russia on edge for years. Stand at the water's edge and look back at the towers before you go inside.