Sırkecı

This guide to Sırkecı station in Istanbul opens with the last direct train from Paris pulling in during May of 1977, its dining car long gone. It reaches back to 1890, when the station opened as the Orient Express's final stop, designed by a German architect who fitted Ottoman arches into a European railway hall. Along the way it follows the diplomats, novelists and spies who filled the line's three-day journeys before the railway ran straight through without a ferry crossing.