The Balkans

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The terrain and the politics that together decided where the Orient Express could run. Physically it is a set of mountain ranges with a few usable river corridors — the Morava, the Nišava, the Maritsa — and the through route from Belgrade to Constantinople threads them. Politically it was, across the service's lifetime, Ottoman territory, then a shifting set of successor states, then a Cold War frontier. The 1883 train had to break at the Danube because the rails did not yet meet; the 1919 Simplon Orient Express was routed south through Milan, Trieste and Belgrade because the Versailles settlement made transit through Germany and Austria politically unavailable. The same region explains both why the service took so long to become continuous and why it kept having to move.