An Unforgettable Train Journey Across the Stunning Landscape of Eastern Turkey

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.

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.