Istanbul to Sofia Train Ride: Cigarette Smuggling and Bribery on the Bosphorus Express (Part 1)

An evening on the oat sodas on Kadıköy’s infamous bar street brought an idea into my friend’s head: we should head to Bulgaria. Whilst I nursed an Efes, we scratched our chins and agreed that the following Friday we’d head on up to Sirkeci, buy our tickets and head off to the Eastern Bloc by train. Now, for some reason I had romantic visions of restaurant cars and plush luxurious cabins with tuxedo-clad attendants catering to our every need. The reality was far from my cheap 60s spy novel dreams…

My friend and I arrived at the station with a few cans of generic Turkish pilsner and a few bottles of fine wine, grinning like Cheshire cats as we purchased our tickets. We were then informed that, due to the ongoing works with the Marmaray project our train wouldn’t leave from Sirkeci but from Halkalı, a station located many light years away. We enquired about the possible ways to get there and were informed that the BN1 bus would do the trick. So we trudged off to find the bus stop and supped on our beers. The bus came and we boarded, beepity-beeped our Istanbul Karts and stood in the middle of bus as it pulled off into the Istanbul traffic. An hour later we’d moved around 5 kms and with the beer finished I started to sweat profusely and weep like a depressed badger. We still had our spirits up, however, and we eventually hit a stretch of open road and reached Halkalı train station some eleven years after setting off from Sirkeci. Halkalı station was like any other end of days vision you have: pitch black and looking as unfriendly as a Scottish man receiving an electricity bill. We stood around under a solitary light and thought about writing a will when we heard a faint shout in the distance. We were being waved over by a solitary Bulgarian. He took us over to the other side of the train station and showed us our train.

What greeted us was what could have been rolling stock that transported prisoners to Siberian gulags. Out of three carriages, ours stuck out like a sore thumb. It suddenly dawned on us that we weren’t to be transported to Bulgaria as tourists but as political prisoners. I had told a risqué joke in a jazz club the week before so we both knew we were going down for a long time. Me, to an uranium enrichment mine somewhere and Archie, my luckless friend, would be singing falsetto ditties to the party bosses at their shady underground filth fests. We opened our last can, said goodbye to the motherland and boarded the train.

We were assigned our cabin by the gruff Bulgarian and then plonked our bags down onto the bed-cum-chair and were informed the cabin would be ours and ours alone for the paltry fee of five euros. We hastily agreed because I’d seen a Welshman board the train earlier and I didn’t fancy midnight renditions of “Land of our Fathers” and drunken sobbing over the state of Welsh rugby. As it transpired, he did spend the night in our cabin but he turned out to be a gentle man with hair softer than duck down quilt.

So, with our bribe paid and our primitive bedding collected, we settled down for the night and opened some wine. The conversation was jovial, I talked about growing up in 1700s Birmingham and opening a library for blind people and Archie was reminiscing about the time he discovered gold in the back of a Ford pick-up in Albany. The Welshman, who we decided to rename ‘Cardiff’ just sat and nodded in amazement at two immensely drunk imbeciles who were looking forward to the last days of Rome. With all that going on, the doors were closed and the train trundled out of Halkalı into the hinterlands.

Sitting around for a few hours we hit upon the idea of exploring the train. I opened the other bottle of wine with my trusty Swiss army knife and we supped until the tipsiness shrouded our better judgement and we got to our feet. We conversed with the other inhabitants of the neighbouring cabins and realising they were not into our talks of grand pianos and cheap day rates at the Holiday Inn, we set off into the other cars. The next car along was the Bucharest carriage, which did look like something from a spy novel written by Hugh Hefner. Plush red carpets and 1930s burlesque-esque low lighting gave us a dreamy feel as we sauntered and belched our way up and down the corridor. I checked out the bathrooms and was greeted by a scene so horrific Sam Peckinpah couldn’t have written it better. The toilet was full to the brim with cigarette butts and a log so big, it was as if a bear from Siberia decided to take his morning sentry duty on this very toilet. Archie was similarly repulsed, and with a pinch of our noses and a very nasal “mother of God…” we set upon discovering what lay ahead.

We stumbled and swayed like an anti-drinking advert into the next carriage along and was surprised to discover that this was a very modern and clean carriage, with a fully functioning toilet. We were so giddy with excitement and full of 2012 Buzbağ that we high fived. We chatted with the conductors who produced tea and smiles and we discovered that this was the Turkish carriage that was to be decoupled at the border. Archie and I were bleary-eyed at this news and we stuck our names and addresses on post-it notes and handed it to the guys so they could at least tell our parents of our safe arrival…to the border at least…

You can read Part 2 here. 

Sam Leivers is a contributor to Yabangee