A Dance For Haydarpasa

It began like this:

“Let’s meet at Haydarpasa. I think there’s some kind of performance there tonight.”

I had a rendezvous with a film photographer expat, a friend-of-a-friend with a vintage Rolleicord. Haydarpasa Train Station is not a usual place to meet at 9pm, but it is near my Kadikoy apartment and I was intrigued. What could possibly be happening in an abandoned train station on a Thursday night?

As I walked towards it— past the green-lit Haydarpasa Mosque, past the fenced-off and unmoving trains—Haydarpasa glowed a dim orange in the evening light. Climbing the stairs, music wafted out of the train station– old music, evocative music. Beautiful cinematic tango music.

The Haydarpasa Train Station is an elegant gem of a building that harkens back to a time when train travel was romantic and practical, when Damascus or Baghdad or Tehran was just at the other end of the tracks, uncomplicated by geopolitics. It’s a grand, soaring thing.

There is poetry in this building.

It’s unused now. The trains, slowly but surely, have stopped fanning out across Anatolia; in theory the transit hub is closed for “repairs” but when, if ever, it will reopen is unclear. There is talk of turning this classic building into a(nother) hotel.

This is where the late-night tango comes in.

The “performance,” it turns out, was a tango protest against the development of Haydarpasa Train Station.

I tucked myself into a corner with the photographer and let myself drift away on dreams of Astor Piazzolla. The tango dancers spanned all ages, with the very old dancing with the very young, middle-aged uncles and twenty-something girls, teenage boys and women who could be their mothers. This was more than a performance– this was a community, coming together in the dark high-ceilinged terminal of the train station. It was a celebration of a special Istanbul space, of grandeur gone by. I wasn’t expecting something so ethereal, so moving, but that’s just what it was. It was an ode to Haydarpasa.

I sat in the hazy shadows as the empty trains stretched out like ghosts and just absorbed the wonder of it all, the ineffable magic of Haydarpasa Train Station. This building remembers a hundred years of travelers and dreamers passing through, remembers empires long gone. Today it contains our tango ode; tomorrow it will be empty again.

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