This is the fourteenth part in a series about riding night trains across Europe and the Near East to Armenia—to spend time in worlds beyond the pathological obsessions of Donald Trump. (This week, Trump’s diplomatic dream team, armed to the teeth with iPhones, readied an illegal attack on Yemen’s Houthi rebels by assembling a Signal chat room and sharing both attack plans and emojis, as if on Facebook pulling together a bachelor party.)
Erzurum is a fortress city in eastern Turkey surrounded by tall mountains and many redoubts, and it has been the scene of endless battles between Russia and the Ottoman Empire. Photo by Matthew Stevenson.
At the main Ankara railway station, I was early for the Dogu Express and killed time by inspecting Atatürk’s sleeping car, which is on permanent display along a platform. He used the car for “his domestic travels”. In one of the windows of the car, there’s a photograph of Atatürk looking out a train window, no doubt taking the pulse of his nation.
Unlike the current Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Atatürk wanted Turkey to be a secular nation. He favored equal rights for women and minorities, and he saw no reason that women should wear headscarves or that men should pray five times a day, unless they so desired. He wanted to integrate Turkey into western alliances and economic systems, and he personally enjoyed many western products as he moved around the growing nation in the 1920s and 30s. He died of liver disease in 1938. Some say it was from consuming half a liter daily of Turkish raki (it’s about 50% proof). Others say he died from chain smoking cigarettes all his adult life.
At the time of his death, Atatürk was the “father of the Turks.” In his personal life he was unmarried, although he adopted eight children. He was married briefly, between 1923 – 25, but divorced his wife for unknown reasons and lived alone (although surrounded by his presidential staff, the army, and his adopted children). There has been some speculation that Mustafa Kemal might well have been bisexual, but no proof exists, just innuendo in conversations and speculation in various biographies.
In official publications Atatürk was a devout Muslim, but there’s ample indication that he might well have been agnostic (although he denied having said: “I have no religion, and at times I wish all religions at the bottom of the sea…”). Certainly in his political lifetime he (unlike Erdoğan) made little effort to fuse church and state. Nor did he arrest journalists and opposition party leaders (at least not more than was necessary).
Personally and politically, Atatürk preferred to see Turkey and Turks as apart from the Arab and fundamentalist Islamic worlds, and he took it in stride that Mecca and Medina were no longer part of his empire, outposts on the Hejaz Railway, built to connect the Sublime Porte to the holy cities. (As well, to be closer to the West, he changed the Turkish alphabet from Arabic to Latin.) He preferred business suits and, on weekends, dressed casually in sweaters and messed around in boats. And, as we know all too well, on formal occasions he preferred top hats and tails.
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My night train to Erzurum left at 17:55. After boarding and stowing my bicycle under my berth, I confirmed what I had feared, which is that I was in a full compartment of four passengers. At least I had a lower berth and my assigned seat was next to the window.
For fellow travelers I was lucky to have been allotted two cheerful Erasmus (exchange) students, one from Italy and one from Spain, who were studying architecture in Istanbul. They were on their spring break and had decided to ride the train to Kars, and fly home from Tbilisi, Georgia. The fourth passenger was a Turkish worker, perhaps for the railways, who was asleep for long stretches, and then vanished in the night, like a character in a Russian novel.
The sleeping car was adjacent to the dining car, where I found it easy to work on my computer and look out the window. The meals were “ready to eat” frozen foods—not the chef’s special—but acceptable provided they were washed down with a cold Turkish beer. I might not have gotten my dream of a single compartment and a traditional dining car, but I was happy to be heading east on the Dogu Express, having spent so much time in the previous years plotting a course to Erzurum and Kars.
I don’t think I had heard of either city, except in some vague general sense, until November 2016, when I embarked on a round-the-world journey using nothing but discount airlines for my travels. I wanted to see if I could make it around for less than $1500, and still make stops that interested me, which in one case included some battlefields in Bulgaria from the 1877 Russo-TurkishWar.
I began the trip flying on Wizz Airlines from Geneva to Sofia for about $38, and the next morning early I took the train to Pleven (sometimes called Plevna), where, at the start of the 1877 war, attacking Russian troops (who said Russia only gets invaded by the West?) besieged Plevna for almost six months until they finally broke through the Turkish lines.
Much remains of the siege lines in the modern Bulgarian city, and I spent a morning inspecting towers, trenches, and a diorama of the siege. On my Kindle, I had a memoir by an English doctor, Charles Snodgrass Ryan, Under The Red Crescent: Adventures Of An English Surgeon With The Turkish Army At Plevna And Erzeroum, 1877-1878, which describes the war’s end in the deep snow around Erzurum.
I remember looking up Erzurum on maps in the Pleven war museums, wondering how I might someday get there. Then, in a World War I museum in Istanbul on the same trip, I discovered that the Russians had again attacked Erzurum in 1916, during their Caucasus offensives in World War I. In those battles the Russians had taken the fortress city and held it until they withdrew from the war in 1918. Why did I know so little about it?
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Nor had I heard of Kars until 1985, when my friend Geoffrey Moorhouse published a book (To the Frontier) about the Northwest Frontier Territory in Pakistan, and the New York Times assigned its review to another travel writer, Philip Glazebrook, who panned Geoffrey’s book.
Upset about the review, Geoffrey (who lived in England) asked me in New York if I knew anything about Glazebrook, which I did not, other than that he had once written a book entitled Journey to Kars, which in those days had me leaning over an atlas to figure out where Kars was. (From such a melodramatic title, I assumed it was on the dark side of the moon, not simply in eastern Turkey on the main line of Dogu Express.)
Geoffrey brooded about the snarky review, and then wrote a letter to the New York Times that I have always admired. It read, in full:
Philip Glazebrook is, of course, perfectly entitled to say whatever he thinks about my book “To the Frontier” (June 16). I find it strange, though, that among his generally withering comments he failed to mention that “To the Frontier” won the Thomas Cook Award for the best travel book of 1984, a competition in which the runners-up were those two considerable writers Eric Newby and Norman Lewis and an understandably disappointed newcomer named Philip Glazebrook. I’m even more surprised, in view of his public hostility to my book in New York, that he should have been effusive about it when we met at the prizegiving in London.
Geoffrey and I were close friends until he died in 2009, and we exchanged many letters and visits during the course of our friendship. In the shorthand of our shared humor, a “journey to Kars,” was any ordinary trip dressed up as an adventure, something I had in mind as I embarked on my own travels to the Turkish frontier.
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Kars had also come to my attention in 2021, when during a lull in the pandemic and just before the Russian war with Ukraine, I decided to take my folding bicycle on a series of night trains from Moscow to Crimea.
It wasn’t the first time I had tried to get to Crimea. Once in 2014, I had train tickets to Simferopol when the Russian president Vladimir Putin sent his little green men to take over and annex Crimea, rendering my Ukrainian visa useless for getting there. But in 2021, after about five visits to the Russian consulate in Geneva, I got a Russian visa that would get me into Crimea (and, so I hoped, out of it).
It took close to a week (with some stops around Volgograd aka Stalingrad) to ride trains from Moscow to Sebastopol, for which much of the Crimean War (1854–56) was fought.
During my time in Balaklava’s valley of death (where the Light Brigade charged to its destruction), I discovered that the last battle of the Crimean War was fought in Kars, not in the hills above Inkerman, which gave me yet another reason to make this journey to eastern Turkey.
On the twenty-two hour train ride to Erzurum, there wasn’t much for me to do other than eat in the dining car, read my books, and work on my computer. Thus I could catch up on emails and plan my time in Erzurum, where all I had done was reserve a room in the Grand Catalkaya Hotel.
Unsuccessfully, I had tried to book a car and driver in Erzurum, as many of its battle sites, I discovered, were well outside the city and many more were on the road to Kars (about four hours to the east).
In rural Turkey, I didn’t want to drive myself in a rental car, but I wasn’t getting a positive vibe whenever I explained in my e-mails that what interested me the most was the Köprüköy Military Memorial or the Battle of Sarıkamış.
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I slept surprising well in my crowded train compartment. We had the window slightly open, and the fresh air combined with the sounds of the rocking train gave me about seven hours of sleep.
In the dining car, I discovered I could mix the fruit that I was carrying with some of the prepackaged meals. Hence I could eat well, dig into my books and computer, and stare at the passing landscape, which in eastern Turkey is a combination of alpine passes, dried river beds, grasslands, agricultural fields, and snow-capped mountains on the horizon, as we snaked our way toward Sivas, Erzincan, and beyond.
Just after I made this trip, Turkish State Railways announced that it was planning to open a high-speed rail link from Ankara to Sivas, which would cut the nine-hour trip down to three hours. Occasionally, I would see evidence of the new line—modern, straight rails cutting across the dry plains.
I am glad I got to ride to on the slow, twenty-two hour night train and spend the day in the dining car with nothing to do except look out the window and read my books. And the book that had my complete attention was J.A.R. Marriott’s The Eastern Question: An Historical Study in European Diplomacy, which was published in 1917 (as the last of the battles for Erzurum and Kars were being waged).
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The book grabbed me from its first sentence, which is a quote that defines “the problem of the Near East” as “that shifting, intractable, and interwoven tangle of conflicting interest, rival peoples, and antagonistic faiths that is veiled under the easy name of the Eastern Question.”
While planning my train rides east, I had gone looking for a book to help me understand the historical context of the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine. A lot of the problem is that Russia’s western border, for two hundred years, has floated in the air.
Marriott became my trusted guide. In clear, crisp language he made sense of many of the conflicts that I had traversed on my night trains, so far, from Vienna to Ankara and beyond (all those Balkan and Crimean wars in the 19th and 20th centuries); and now, as I was heading toward the Verdun of eastern Turkey, Erzurum, the war between Russia and Ukraine felt like a variation on the fighting of 1853 and 1877, which were similar wars to see who would control the Black Sea and its environs.
If you want a sampler of Marriott’s diplomatic prose, here is his description of how great power politics over Bosnia and Herzegovina between 1877-1914 broke Europe apart along the lines of its competing monarchies:
The virtual annexation of Bosnia and the Herzegovina to the Austrian Empire was Bismarck’s acknowledgement of the obligations which in 1870 he had incurred to Habsburg neutrality. But the gift bestowed upon Austria caused the first serious breach in the good relations between Berlin and St. Petersburg. The wire between those capitals was never actually cut so long as Bismarck controlled the German Foreign Office; but his successor found himself compelled to choose between the friendship of Austria and that of Russia, and he deliberately preferred the former.
It flew in the face of Bismarck’s axiom: “The secret of politics? Make a good treaty with Russia.”
