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This massive project includes a 13.6-kilometer Bosphorus crossing and an upgrade of suburban train lines. The Bosphorus will be crossed by a 1.4-kilometer earthquake-proof immersed tube, and sections of the tube will be placed fifty-six meters below sea level. New underground stations will be built at Sirkeci, Yenikapı, and Üsküdar, and there will be forty stations in total.

The project was begun in 2004 and was due to be finished in 2012, but it’s currently two years behind schedule due to the excavation of a Byzantine archaeological find on the site of the European tunnel terminal. This find is equally noteworthy: it’s the “greatest nautical archeological site ever discovered” and has revealed “the first Byzantine naval craft ever brought to light” (Richard Covington, Saudi Aramco World, January/February 2009).

Macallan!

Also written as Mash’Allah, this phrase translates as “Gift of God” or “God has willed it” and is used as a blessing or an exclamation of joy when in the presence of something beautiful. (See also Nazar boncuğu, page 566.)

Midnight Express

The film that won screenwriter Oliver Stone an Oscar in 1979 may have single-handedly damaged Turkey’s reputation more than any political, religious, or cultural conflagration. The meaning of the expression is little known and interesting, as Tom Brosnahan relates in Bright Sun, Strong Tea: “After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, when the new border was drawn between Greece and Turkey, the old railway line ended up partly in Turkey and partly in Greece. Until the 1970s when a new line was built entirely on the Turkish side of the border, a slow train departed Istanbul each evening at 10:10 p.m. bound for Uzunköprü, near the Greco-Turkish frontier. After leaving Uzunköprü it headed north toward Edirne, crossing the frontier into Greece at Phthion (Pithio). It stopped there to take on Greek border guards who rode the train until it crossed back into Turkey, reaching Edirne at 8:01 a.m.” As this was a Turkish train—there were no official stops in Greece—it was entirely a domestic run, and therefore no passport was needed to travel on it.

Though drug smugglers named it the Midnight Express, it was very much a local train. Brosnahan continues, “If you had a good reason to get off in Greece, you could work up the courage to jump. After a convict jumped off the Midnight Express he’d call the American consulate in Thessaloniki, claim that he had lost his passport, apply for and receive a new one, and be on his way. If the border guards saw him jump, they’d jail him for a night, consult with the U.S. consulate, get him a new passport, and send him on his way.” The employment of the Midnight Express train allowed for Turkish officials to release convicted drug smugglers pending appeal. This cut down on incarceration expenses, and as the convicts were being released, they would be told there was a slow train that made its way from Istanbul to Edirne through Greece.

In 2004, when Oliver Stone visited Turkey, he officially apologized for offenses to the Turkish people, stating, “It’s true, I over-dramatized the script.” Billy Hayes, the American subject of the story, has also publicly stated that the movie differed from the book in several key ways and that some of the violence portrayed in the film did not happen to him while he was imprisoned. I sincerely hope that anyone who saw the movie, and anyone who sees it in the future, will understand that it’s risky to dabble with illegal drugs in Turkey (as is the case in any other country, too), but by no means should one individual’s experience in prison be an indictment of the entire Turkish population.

Music

The Rough Guide to Turkey features a very good twenty-six-page overview of the various types of Turkish music (there are likely far more than you thought!), including a guide to Turkish instruments and a selected discography. A few discs I bought in Istanbul that I particularly like and recommend include the following: Istanbul 360, from the popular restaurant of the same name, mixed and compiled