She left her husband at his digs in the northern Syrian desert, handed his passport to the uniformed Turk in Nusaybin, and boarded the express to Aleppo as the train whistled. Once there, she checked into the Baron, the only first-class hotel in town, where she took room 203, and began writing what is probably the most famous crime novel of all time.
“At 5 o’clock in the morning, in Aleppo station, parked the train designated under the pompous name of ‘Taurus-Express’. It included a dining car, a sleeping car and two other cars. [Traduction Louis Postif.] This is how it begins The crime of the Orient Express, by Agatha Christie. Set at the scene of the author’s return trip through the Middle East, it evokes a vanished world of connecting cabins, liveried controllers, embroidered handkerchiefs and passengers dressing up for dinner.
The victim is an American crook who receives 12 stab wounds in his cabin. However, even if this crime made Agatha Christie the world’s best-selling novelist, it pales in comparison to the one unfolding around its author – the dismantling of the vast network of railways that covered the Middle East. .
The Ottoman Rail Boom
Passengers on train 0500 to Istanbul came from Baghdad, Kirkuk and Mosul. They could also have come from Khartoum, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Damascus and Basra. Maps from the time show that the area was criss-crossed by railroad tracks. qualified as“sick man of Europe”, the Ottoman Empire, however, showed remarkable energy during its last decades. In 1888, Sultan Abdülhamid II embarked on the most ambitious major works in six centuries of Ottoman power: connecting the four corners of the Empire by rail.
Abdülhamid began with the holy places of Islam. With the help of Christian and Jewish contractors, he built a line that started from the Mediterranean and crossed the limestone hills of Judea to reach Jerusalem. The first load of pilgrims was deposited in front of the Al-Aqsa mosque in 1892. Eight years later, the sultan launched the construction of a line linking Damascus, the traditional starting point of the hajj, the Muslim pilgrimage, to Medina, where the Prophet Muhammad is buried. Completed in 1908, this line fifteen times longer than the previous one transformed the pilgrimage: whereas it previously required a perilous journey of forty days by camel through the deserts of Arabia, it could now be done in three comfortable days. Damascus Station, which was renamed the Gate of Allah, was a jewel of Islamic Baroque.
This project was accompanied by other great achievements. During its twilight years, the Empire linked three booming Levantine ports – Tripoli, Beirut and Haifa – to several cities on the ancient Silk Road, including Damascus, Homs and Aleppo. On the eve of World War I, the sultans joined forces with the Kaiser to build a line from Berlin to Baghdad that bypassed the British bottleneck of the Suez Canal. German engineers helped link the Taurus Mountains in the final weeks of the war – but too late to reinforce the fronts against the British offensive to the north.
The last European stone
The European empires that invaded the Middle East achieved much of what the Ottomans had left at the drawing board stage.
“In the 1930s, you could get from the English Channel to Cairo by changing trains only three times.”
The last section, in third class, cost the equivalent of about two days of a worker’s work. We departed from Haifa at 8:30 a.m., headed south to arrive in the Mediterranean port of Gaza by lunchtime, continued west into the Sinai and arrived in the Egyptian capital around 10:30 p.m.
From there, you could drive along the Nile in one of the first air-conditioned cars to Luxor, the Valley of the Kings, and then to Sudan. “The most direct and fastest route to Damascus, Beirut, Baalbeck and Aleppo”, proclaimed a Palestinian Railways brochure praising the connections from Haifa. We “could reach all the Arab world from Jaffa station”, explains Sami Abou Shehadeh, a Palestinian historian who is a member of the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament.
Rise and fall
“The Middle East has been a cosmopolitan mix of languages, ethnicities and religions since the dawn of civilization. The railway brought them together like fruit in a salad bowl.”
Agatha Christie’s 13 suspects are “of all classes and all nationalities”. Muslim pilgrims from Tulkarem traveled alongside Jewish workers on the Haifa-Damascus trip organized by the Histadrut, the Zionist trade union. L’