An Unforgettable Train Journey Across the Stunning Landscape of Eastern Turkey

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This story is part of Iconic Train Journeys, a spotlight on the world's most legendary railway adventures, from luxury trains that evoke old-world glamor to historic routes that have rebuilt nations and itineraries that reveal the hidden depths of our favorite destinations.

Ankara, the Turkish capital, has been wilting under days of intense heat. Our taxi driver lets us out at the station with a gift of a cool apple. The forecourt is a mess of commuters competing for taxis and minivans. Through its automatic doors, though, is a gleaming air-conditioned cathedral to Turkey’s high-speed rail. The relief is short-lived—a uniformed attendant at the information window soon informs us our train, the Doğu Ekspresi (translation: Eastern Express) actually departs from the old station next door.

What we see, when we arrive, is a study in contrasts: Where the new station’s marble floors had been polished to a sharp gleam, here, the marble has been dulled from a century’s scuffing of shoes and slippers. We slump down and immediately begin to sweat.

After the Ottoman Empire’s collapse in 1922, the new Turkish republic set out to modernize into a secular European-style state. The rail network played a large role in this. Where the Ottoman railways had primarily been constructed, owned, and in service of foreign companies, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the republic’s founder, envisioned the new republic unified by a railway network. Completed in 1939, the Eastern portion, from Sivas to Erzurum, was key in realizing this vision: Turkey’s famously remote Anatolian provinces were to be connected to the education and services of Istanbul and Ankara and, if needed, the line could transport military to Turkish territory ceded by Armenia, now part of a new Soviet Union.

A decade ago I had motorcycled through the provinces of Eastern Anatolia, and witnessed up-close the region's hash, mountainous terrain. Being cradled in its jagged valleys was a feeling that stuck with me, and later, when I met a hydrogeologist in Laos, inspired by the country’s similarly jagged karst mountains, I proceeded to try and impress her with my knowledge of its geological features. She saw through it all, of course, but a year later we planned a journey on the Doğu Express. While a special Doğu Express catering to tourists operates in the winter high season, we chose the regular service, which functions as transport and not recreation.

The waiting passengers look glazed in the platform's heavy air. Luckily, the train arrives with a fresh breeze, ten carriages drawn by a diesel engine, the red of the Turkish flag. The instant it stops, sweaty passengers are slinging luggage aboard and climbing up to locate seats and air-conditioning. Over 26 hours and 800 miles, this train will trundle to the eastern city of Kars along the border with Armenia.

A hundred years later, Atatürk’s secular legacy has come under pressure. No alcohol is served onboard and as a mixed unmarried couple we are forbidden to cohabit. The workaround is to book out an entire couchette of four Pullman beds retractable into facing seats covered by the garish '90s fabric that seems to upholster all public transport here. While I don’t feel great occupying double the real estate, our cabin’s wide window, power socket, and lockable door keeps lingering guilt at a comfortable distance.

With a shudder and a belch of exhaust, we pull out punctually. We pass through a city embroiled in a midsummer gridlock as Ankara’s bureaucrats and university students return to their tower blocks. A day earlier we had been in the thick of it, amidst one of the world’s oldest capital cities, visiting monuments to Atatürk and Ankara’s Hittite heritage. But now we climb through its outskirts of squat hills of lonely gas stations and power lines. I feel the deficit of human energy.

Thankfully, the adjoining dining cart is alive with the camaraderie typical for the start of any long journey. We sit mid-carriage at a sticky table to drink tea and watch. In here, children squirm over parents’ laps as old men sip strong tea to punctuate intense exchanges. A girl too short to activate the automatic door, becomes stuck in the inter-carriage airlock, set free by her smiling father. A German tourist introduces death metal to a table of old Turkish men. They’re unimpressed. “You either like it or you don’t,” he says, visibly disappointed. On offer is tea, coffee, cold drinks, and pre-packed sandwiches. I am glad to unpack the stuffed vine leaves we bought from a station kiosk. After dinner I doze on the swaying bunk as faraway lights slip past outside.

I awake at dawn. Sivas begins with apartment blocks and minarets lancing a peach sky shaded with haze. The city’s station, like every stop, is an opportunity for the smokers to file out but they have to hurry. Before the city wakes, we are off again, plunging deeper into Anatolia.

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From here to Erzurum was the most complicated track to build. A hundred and thirty eight tunnels were needed to traverse the Eastern Anatolian High Plateau that had once made these communities famously remote. The Turkish government put out an international tender but after foreign contractors failed to deliver, it took on the project itself, another source of rail-related pride. One by one each station opened to a festive atmosphere until on September 6, 1939, the first locomotive pulled in to a flag-bedecked Erzurum station watched by over 40,000 people. “Erzurum is now in vocal range of Ankara,” one minister proclaimed.

All this engineering prowess is on display. With each tunnel the carriage is plunged into darkness, making it impossible to read more than a few sentences of Norman Stone’s Turkey: A Short History. After battling through a couple of pages I look up, and feel like a fool. Turkey is through that window, not in this book. We are cutting through a narrow ravine, below rocky walls of burned ochre, sometimes hard and flat as marble, other times as crumbly as a cookie. My partner explains this is geological diversity.

Over coffee in the dining cart she describes how this terrain is the product of slow violence. Mountains were formed by the collision of three tectonic plates: Arabic, Eurasian, and Anatolian. We pass rail-side huts where twisting cracks snake up the walls, a reminder that this route was not just built but rebuilt, thanks to the ever-present threat of an earthquake. Later I find out an earthquake measuring 4.1 on the Richter scale registered just South of Erzurum.

In Divriği the call to morning prayer rings out and by mid-morning we are tracking the Euphrates. After a decade of long-distance rail journeys, I cannot remember a more dramatic vista. Passengers gather in the hallways to watch in silence as shepherds guard their flock, as they drink the aqua water under the gaze of cliffs glaring down. Given the antiquity of shepherds on the Euphrates, it’s worth asking whether Atatürk’s ambitions have generated opportunities beyond the few lira exchanged for vine leaves by a gawking tourist. Today, both Erzurum and Erzincan sport their own universities, and while the metrics show that for decades rates of poverty, infant mortality, and literacy have all headed in the right direction, opportunities today are more likely created by tax cuts and fibre optics than rail. Perhaps it’s more meaningful that this train is well used for its intended purpose: transporting Turkish people across their country’s difficult terrain. Success is underlined at each platform whenever passengers step down to meet their waiting families.

Past Erzurum the landscape widens to farmland—the end of the old Eastern express. From here to Kars the Russian-built track was ceded from Armenia, part of the 1920 Peace Treaty of Alexandropol that ended the Turkish-Armenian war, and rebuilt to the standard Turkish gauge in 1957. Again, the sun sets, this time to sunflowers drooping in the scorching heat—despite an elevation of nearly 6,500 feet.

It's dark again and I turn off the lights to watch a landscape bathed by a low yellow moon. An hour late, our scheduled arrival of 8:20 p.m. slips past as time loses its definition. Then a knock. The carriage attendant stands waiting for our bedsheets to be returned. Outside, the outskirts of Kars begin to appear. I switch on the light, and we stand blinking. It’s time to return to the outside world. Tomorrow’s visit to the Ani ruins will demand decisions and logistics beyond timing snacks and naps. I’m not sure I am ready.

Originally Appeared on Condé Nast Traveler