prior probability

“In the station are a jam of porters, hotel runners, and Anglo-Levantine gentlemen in slightly soiled collars, badly soiled white trousers, garlicized breaths and hopeful manners who hope to be hired as interpreters…. I called a porter, gave him my bags, and told him, ‘Hotel de Londres’ ….” (Ernest Hemingway, “Constantinople, Dirty and White, Not Glistening and Sinister,” Toronto Daily Star (October 18, 1922), reprinted here and in Hemingway 1985, pp. 227-229)

That is Ernest Hemingway’s description of his arrival in Constantinople, first published in the 18 October 1922 edition of The Toronto Daily Star under the headline “Constantinople, Dirty White, Not Glistening and Sinister.” His first footsteps inside the Queen of Cities would have been in the main railway station, which was then called Müşir Ahmet Pasha Station, in the Sirkeci neighborhood of Istanbul, where Hemingway would have disembarked on that fall day in 1922.

This railway station was the eastern terminus of the famed Orient Express connecting Western Europe with the Near East. Hemingway had boarded the original “Simplon Orient Express” at the Gare de Lyon in Paris on September 25, most likely travelled through Germany, Austria, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria (see, e.g., Pangere 2024) before finally arriving in Constantinople on September 30. In all, Hemingway’s journey would have taken 80 hours and covered 3,094 kilometers. (Ibid.)

A temporary train station was first built in Sirkeci in the 1870s when Sultan Abdülhamit II allowed a stretch of track to be built through the gardens skirting Topkapi Palace. (Thrifty Traveller 2013). The railway line connecting Istanbul to the outside world ran along the shoreline of the Sea of Marmara. Ibid.) Abdülhamit II then appointed a Prussian architect, August Jasmund, to design a new permanent train station to replace a temporary one built in 1873. (See Turkish State Railways n.d.) Construction began on February 11, 1888, and was completed in 1890. (The station officially opened to the public on November 3, 1890. Ibid.) Among the building’s state-of-the-art innovations are gas lighting and heating provided by large tile stoves made in Austria.

According to one scholar and travel blogger (Caroline Swicegood 2017), Istanbul’s main railway station became “one of the best-known examples of European Orientalism, the general term for Western adaptations of architecture in the Ottoman Empire and elsewhere in the Eastern world.” The train station featured turrets, many restaurants, and a beer garden: “On both sides of the middle entrance, there were turret clocks, three big restaurants, a large beer-garden, and an outdoor restaurant behind the station,” and “[t]he sea was reaching to the building foot and terraces led down to the sea.” (Turkish State Railways n.d.). Alas, according to one contemporary source (Thrifty Traveller 2013), the beer garden and outdoor restaurants in front of the station on terraces leading down to the sea are now gone, for they have been replaced by “a petrol station and a busy highway”, which blocks direct access to the waterfront.”

The old and glamorous eastern terminus of the Orient Express is now called “Sirkeci Station” (Sirkeci Garı) and is a local railway line only. Alas, the original Orient Express stopped running to Istanbul on May 19, 1977, and all international connections to Sirkeci Station stopped in May 2013. (Pangere 2024) Today, Sirkeci is a touristy waterfront area located on the tip of Istanbul’s historic peninsula, near the confluence of the Golden Horn with the southern entrance of the Bosphorus strait and the Sea of Marmara, just northwest of Gülhane Park and the Topkapı Palace. During the Byzantine period, Sirkeci was known as “Prosphorion” (Προσφόριον), and it contained a busy harbor, which no longer exists. (Ibid.) It is unlikely, however, that Hemingway spent much time Sirkeci, since, by his account, he hailed a taxi directly to his lodgings, the Hotel de Londres, which is still in existence in the Pera district of the city across the Galata Bridge.