Ankara to Kars – Into the East: The Doğu Express

There is a peculiar kind of time that belongs only to trains. On the Doğu Express — the long steel artery running from Ankara to Kars across the spine of Anatolia — time stretches, contracts, disappears altogether. You don’t so much travel as surrender.

The train leaves the Turkish capital in the evening and does not hurry. The full journey takes anywhere from 26 to 32 hours (we will take 33 hours!) , depending on weather, freight traffic, and the whims of the tracks. Schedules are theoretical; reality belongs to the mountains, the rivers, and the endless plateau.

This is not high-speed Europe. It is a slow-moving theatre of landscapes: rolling steppe outside Kayseri, snowy ridges near Erzurum, deep valleys carved by the Euphrates. For hours, we followed the river, sometimes high above it, sometimes skimming the banks. At school, I had read of Mesopotamia’s twin rivers; here was one of them, silver against the winter earth, indifferent to passengers staring through fogged glass.

Inside our carriage — a sleeper with four bunks, modest but sufficient — Lorena and I created our own rhythm—a chessboard balanced on the fold-out table, pieces toppling with the sway of the train. Books left half-read as the scenery stole attention. Conversations are interrupted by the sudden appearance of a gorge or a shepherd’s hut miles from any road.

The Doğu Express is many things — transport, nostalgia, adventure, endurance. However, above all, it is a reminder that travel can still be about duration, about yielding to distance rather than erasing it.

The Doğu Express has become a phenomenon in recent years, especially among young Turkish travellers. What was once a quiet, workaday service linking Ankara with the far east has turned into a kind of pilgrimage, part nostalgia, part social media performance. Compartments are decorated with fairy lights, picnics sprawl across tables, and guitars emerge at midnight. In 2019, demand became so intense that a second version was introduced: the Touristic Doğu Express, running with fewer stops but longer halts for sightseeing tours, marketed directly to visitors. We chose the original train, less curated, more continuous — a journey rather than an itinerary.

The dining car is the train’s true parliament. Tea glasses clink, trays rattle, and strangers drift into conversations as naturally as the scenery changes outside. Breakfast: bread, cheese, olives, tea strong enough to burn. Lunch and dinner: repetition with minor variations, but always accompanied by the sense that time is not wasted when eaten slowly, watching Anatolia scroll past.

Night came early. The compartments darkened, the rhythm of the rails shifting into a lullaby. Outside, the world dissolved into silhouettes: pine forests, frozen rivers, distant villages whose lights looked like constellations misplaced on earth.

And then, after almost 2 days y of suspended time, the arrival in Kars. They call it “Little Siberia” for its winters, and stepping off the train into the brittle air felt like surfacing from a long, snowbound dream. The journey itself had been the destination: the chessboard, the tea glass rattling, the river below the cliffs.

And then, after more than a day of suspended time, the arrival in Kars. It was 11 p.m., the station deserted, the town sunk into the silence of a provincial winter night. Streets empty, snow muffling every sound, the air sharp as a blade. We checked into our hotel expecting nothing more than sleep.

But Kars had one last surprise: a small café still open past midnight, lights glowing like an invitation. Inside, warmth and laughter. The owner insisted we try the local treasures: Kars kaşarı, a dense, nutty cheese aged in caves, and a glass of the region’s milk, so creamy it felt almost sweet. These are said to be among the finest in the world, and that night — after thirty hours on a train — they tasted like a feast, like an arrival, like the perfect prologue to everything Kars still had to reveal.