
A 100 Years of Hijaz Railway
A century after its construction, the Hijaz Railway becomes the spine of a journey across Turkey, tracing the line from Afyon eastward through towns that grew up around its stations. Afyon appears first, a city once overrun in war and now presented as a crossroads where rail lines converge. In Aksehir the film lingers on a station building preserved almost as a museum piece, treated as a place where local history sits close to the surface rather than locked away. The route continues toward Konya, following stretches of track and platforms built during the Ottoman era to carry pilgrims toward the Hijaz. Local voices and station architecture carry most of the storytelling, with the railway itself serving as a thread connecting Ottoman engineering ambition to the present-day towns it still runs through. The film stays close to the ground, favoring specific stops and buildings over a broad historical lecture, and works best as a regional travelogue built around a single, still-functioning piece of infrastructure.