“The whole bureaucracy was here,” he
said, pointing out the Sirkeci train station, a classic example of European
Orientalist architecture, with colored tiles, Moorish-style archways and twin
clock towers, which opened in 1890 and served as the final destination of the
fabled Orient Express.
The age of grandiosity didn’t last long.
When Vladimir
Nabokov alighted here in 1919, he found “a city in ruins,” Mr. Pamuk said.
“There was no physical destruction, but this place used to get the riches of
all the Middle East and the Balkans, and then it all vanished, and it was
reduced to poverty.”
-Joshua Hammer
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