Istanbul

city · earth

The eastern object of the whole Orient Express project, and the city that shows what the phrase "the route survived, the purpose did not" actually costs a map. Advertised in 1883 as Constantinople, capital of an empire that no longer exists, and officially Istanbul from 1930 under the Turkish Republic. Rails reached it from Europe in the 1870s and 1880s under the Hirsch concession; the terminus building at Sirkeci opened in 1890. It is the only city on this Journey where the passenger arrives on one continent and the onward railway starts on another, at Haydarpaşa across the Bosphorus — a break the through service never bridged, and which was closed only in the twenty-first century by the Marmaray tunnel, which also took Sirkeci out of main-line use.