End of the line for Istanbul's Ottoman railway station?

Nostalgia comes in many forms. Quite high up the scale for me is the Haydarpaşa railway terminus in Istanbul. For over a century this magnificent ormolu late Ottoman edifice with its nods at art deco, has been the beginning and the end of journeys. It ‘s a place of grandeur and confusion – where Europe tilts into the Orient. It looks out over the sea: at the Galata bridge that spans the Golden Horn; at the fussy steamers smudging the sky with smoke as they ply the Bosphorus; at the swarms of people passing to; at the incessant  buying, selling, loitering, fishing and travelling to and from mysterious destinations.

Through the Haydarpaşa ran the Berlin to Baghdad railway. The Orient Express ended here. It has seen pass along its platforms explorers, spies, soldiers, diplomats, refugees, gastarbeiter, pilgrims to Mecca – and the plain curious. Agatha Christie came on this line. Old postcards summon up a lost world of moustachioed porters, portmanteaux and the grand Pera Palace Hotel, fezzes and  dragomans.

 

 The Orient 'Express' brought me to and from Istanbul a few times in the 1970s – not a plush Pullman service, but a slow, low-grade clanking journey courtesy of the unreliable rolling stock of central Europe, two days sitting semi-upright, semi-comatose with brief stops to encounter the expensive air of Switzerland, the stern demeanour of Bulgarian customs officials, the offerings of food salesmen on the platforms of Belgrade and Sofia, the enjoyment and annoyance of fellow travellers.

The train came via Calais and Paris, Mussolini’s slab of a station in Venice and Tito’s Yugoslavia, through fields of sunflowers and wheat where headscarved women wielded large scythes, past beehives, tiny houses, flocks of birds, communist apartment blocks and sleeping dogs. And on into Istanbul, running along the shore, with the Sea of Marmara glittering in the sunlight on one side, on the other the crumbling walls of old Constantinople and the ruins of Byzantine palaces converted into shacks and metal bashing workshops. Finally, exhausted but exhilarated by this jumble of passing life, the train ushers you under the iron pillared canopy of the station – and Istanbul begins. You step out of the doors, startled and disorientated by the pounding of new sensations: the smell of frying fish, car exhaust, roasting chestnuts and sea water; the street cries of sellers of sesame rolls, lottery tickets, shoe shining services, football shirts and mobile phone services;  the squabbling of gulls; the viscid, malodorous waters of the once Golden Horn – admittedly cleaner today than forty years ago. And the Galata Bridge across it, now a fixed structure, but until the 1990s a series of connected pontoons that rippled disconcertingly beneath your feet, evidence that Istanbul that possesses a vivid magic.  

The last time I looked in, the Haydarpaşa was still receiving trains. Now it’s probably a shell. A new station has been constructed on the Marmara shore and the Haydarpaşa seems on the way to becoming a piece of real estate up for grabs to private interests. An 'accidental' fire ripped through its roof in 2010. Istanbul is falling prey to the blight of many big cities: the privatisation of public spaces,  around which the protests in Taksim Square revolved,  the squeezing out of the poor, the destruction of inconvenient but iconic buildings – an attack not quite on the scale of the Mafia’s sack of Palermo in the 1960s, but the cold hand of big money is clutching at the city's fabric. The Haydarpaşa came to mind because I read a Turkish blogger on all this.  

 

‘It seems to me,’ said Pierre Gilles, a sixteenth century visitor, ‘that while other cities may be mortal, this one will remain as long as there are men on earth.’ Let’s hope.