Ankara to Kars – Bureaucrats, Trains and Unexpected Charms

Leaving Istanbul behind, I boarded the train to Ankara. This wasn’t the famous Doğu Express yet—that adventure was waiting for me later in the evening—but rather the standard intercity connection between the two capitals. Still, the experience was far from ordinary.

The ride instantly brought back memories of my journey on the Balkan Express from Sofia to Istanbul just a few days earlier. Both routes, operated by the Turkish State Railways, share that slightly old-fashioned charm: a steady rhythm, modest coaches, and landscapes sliding by as if time itself had slowed down. It’s the kind of travel that makes you feel the distance, not just cover it.

Ankara is a city that resists romance. It is administrative, bureaucratic, and functional — a capital that wears its seriousness like a uniform. Lorena and I began the day by leaving our bags at the Double Comfort Hotel, a temporary refuge turned storage depot thanks to Radical Storage, before hiring a private guide to help us navigate the city.

It was, in hindsight, a mistake. The man was expensive, his knowledge thin, and his sense of direction non-existent. Beyond his fee, we paid for taxis that lurched us from one site to the next, our day stretched far beyond its intended frame. Yet even incompetence cannot disguise the gravitas of Ankara’s monuments.

Arriving in Ankara, I understood why many call it “a city of bureaucrats.” The wide boulevards, the government buildings, the air of seriousness—it all fits the label. Yet, reducing Ankara to that alone would be a mistake. Beneath its formal surface, the city holds corners that surprise, places that feel almost hidden from the hurried eye.

One of these is the TCDD Open Air Steam Locomotive Museum, a gem for train lovers and the simply curious alike. Tucked away near the Maltepe district, the museum displays an open-air collection of old steam locomotives. Walking among these iron giants, relics of another era, is like stepping into a time capsule. It’s quirky, atmospheric, and entirely unexpected—exactly the kind of discovery that makes you rethink a city you thought you had figured out.

At Anıtkabir, the monumental mausoleum of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of modern Türkiye, we found the place swollen with ceremony: President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan himself was present that day, paying homage. The air was thick with symbolism and military precision; the marble esplanades and landscaped gardens offered not only a grave but a theatre of national identity.

From there, we wound our way to Ankara Castle (Hisar), its ancient walls rising above the old city like a crown. Within the ramparts, cobbled lanes and Ottoman houses leaned against each other, their upper floors overhanging like eaves of memory. On one corner, I bought a copper star — humble, shining — to hang on the wall of my garden back in Dublin, a fragment of Anatolia carried home.

The Temple of Augustus and Rome, by contrast, was mostly ruin — two walls and a gate, yet inscribed with words that once trumpeted the deeds of emperors. Standing there, in a city more often defined by modern politics, it felt like a whisper from a much older conversation.

Lunch was taken in a place so grubby it might have turned away anyone less stubborn. No English was spoken; menus were nonexistent. Google Translate became our bridge across silence. Plates arrived: oily, hearty, and strangely satisfying — the sort of food that restores you precisely because it doesn’t care to impress.

The afternoon brought relief in the form of water and steam. At the Historic Karacabey Hammam, marble walls radiated heat, and the air was thick with soap and tradition. I had come prepared, with mitt and shampoo in hand, and submitted to the ritual of peel and massage. The pressure was lighter than other hammams I had known, but the experience — the domed ceiling, the echo of water, the languor of the lounge with its wood-panelled cabins — was worth the journey alone. It was, perhaps, the finest moment of the day.

By evening, we returned to the station for the journey eastward. The Doğu Ekspresi (Eastern Express) stood waiting, a train of promise and romance. Our couchette was clean and surprisingly comfortable. As the train pulled out at 18:00, I thought of how such journeys are vanishing from Europe: the night train, once an essential artery, now dismissed as an anachronism. Yet here, in Türkiye, it endures.

There is nothing quite like it: the rhythm of wheels, the intimacy of a compartment, the sense that the land itself unfolds around you while you drift between waking and dream. Practical, economical, romantic — a night train gives you not just transport, but adventure.

As the lights of Ankara receded, the rails pulled us east, toward the mountains of Kars, and further still, toward the wild edges of the Caucasus.

Dogu Express