There are trains, and then there is the Orient Express.
Since 1883, the name alone has conjured something beyond transportation — a rolling world of polished mahogany, white-gloved stewards, and the slow, cinematic unfurling of a continent through a brass-framed window. To board the Orient Express is to step into a story that has been told and retold across novels, films, and a century of collective imagination. But the journey is real, the cities are real, and the romance — if you let it — is entirely real too.
This is your guide to retracing the classic route: Paris to Istanbul, west to east, through some of the most storied cities in Europe.
Paris (CDG) — Where the Story Begins
You start, as all great European adventures should, in Paris.
The original Orient Express departed from the Gare de l'Est, a grand Haussmann-era terminus on the Right Bank that still operates today. Before you board, give yourself at least two days in the city — not because Paris needs an introduction, but because leaving too quickly would be a mistake you'd regret somewhere around Vienna.
Wander the Marais. Linger over a café crème at a zinc-topped bar. Stand on the Pont de la Tournelle at dusk and watch the Seine go gold. Paris is the overture, and it deserves to be heard in full.
The modern Venice Simplon-Orient-Express (VSOE), operated by Belmond, departs from Paris Gare de Lyon — a detail worth noting if you're booking the luxury revival rather than piecing together the route independently.
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Lausanne (GVA) — The Swiss Interlude
Crossing into Switzerland, the train curves along the northern shore of Lake Geneva, and you are treated to one of the great unremarkable pleasures of European rail: a view so quietly beautiful that you almost miss it because you were reading.
Lausanne sits above the lake on a series of steep terraces, a city of watchmakers, Olympic bureaucrats, and some of the finest white wines you will ever drink. The Lavaux vineyard terraces — a UNESCO World Heritage Site — cascade down to the water just east of the city, and if you have an afternoon to spare, a walk through the vines with a glass of Chasselas in hand is as close to perfection as a Tuesday can get.
The nearest international airport is Geneva (GVA), just forty minutes along the lakeshore — a natural entry point if you're joining the route here rather than travelling from Paris.
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Munich (MUC) — Baroque Grandeur and Beer Garden Ease
The train crosses into Bavaria and the mood shifts — the architecture grows heavier and more ornate, the pace slows, and someone nearby almost certainly orders a beer before noon without a trace of self-consciousness.
Munich is a city that knows exactly what it is and has no interest in apologizing for it. The Marienplatz is the obvious starting point, with the neo-Gothic Rathaus and its famous Glockenspiel drawing the crowds, but the real Munich is found in its museums — the Deutsches Museum, the Alte Pinakothek, the BMW Welt — and in its English Garden, one of the largest urban parks in the world, where surfers ride a standing wave on the Eisbach river year-round. The beer gardens are not a tourist affectation; they are a civic institution, and an afternoon at the Hirschgarten or the Chinesischer Turm is as authentically Bavarian an experience as you will find.
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Milan (MXP) — Gateway to the South
The train dips into Italy through the Simplon Tunnel — bored through the Alps at the turn of the twentieth century and, at the time of its completion in 1906, the longest railway tunnel in the world. You emerge into the Italian light somewhere above Domodossola, and by the time you reach Milan, the architecture, the coffee, and the ambient noise have all shifted register entirely.
Milan is not a city that announces itself the way Rome or Florence does. It rewards patience. The Duomo is extraordinary up close — a Gothic confection of marble spires that took nearly six centuries to complete. The Brera neighbourhood offers some of the best gallery-going in Italy. And the aperitivo culture, that early-evening ritual of Campari and free snacks, is something you will want to adopt permanently.
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Venice (VCE) — The Unmissable Detour
Strictly speaking, Venice is a detour from the most direct Paris–Istanbul line. But the VSOE makes it the centrepiece of its itinerary, and once you arrive, you will understand why no one has ever complained.
You step off the train at Santa Lucia station and directly onto the Grand Canal. There is no city on earth with an arrival quite like it.
Venice is best experienced early in the morning, before the day-trippers arrive, and late in the evening, after they leave. Walk away from San Marco. Get lost in Dorsoduro or Cannaregio. Eat cicchetti at a bacaro with a glass of prosecco. Take the vaporetto out to Murano or Torcello. And at some point, simply sit by a canal and let the city do what it has been doing to visitors for a thousand years.
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Vienna (VIE) — The Empire's Drawing Room
If Paris is the overture, Vienna is the first movement — grand, self-assured, and almost aggressively cultured.
The Habsburg Empire may have dissolved in 1918, but Vienna has never quite accepted the memo. The Ringstrasse, that great boulevard of imperial ambition, is lined with the Opera House, the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the Parliament, and the Burgtheater — all built within a few decades of each other in the 1860s and 70s, as if Franz Joseph had simply decided to commission an entire civilization at once. Walk it in the early morning before the tour groups arrive and it is genuinely breathtaking.
Beyond the monuments, Vienna rewards slower attention: a Melange and a slice of Sachertorte at Café Central, the Naschmarkt on a Saturday morning, the Belvedere gardens at dusk. And the music — whether it's the Philharmoniker, a chamber concert in a palace, or a busker in the U-Bahn playing Schubert — is inescapable in the best possible way.
The Orient Express passed through Vienna on multiple historical variants, and it remains one of the route's essential stops. Do not rush it.
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Budapest (BUD) — Grand and Slightly Melancholy
Budapest arrives like a revelation. The train crosses the Danube and suddenly you are looking at one of the great urban panoramas of Europe: the castle district on the Buda side, the Parliament building on the Pest side, the Chain Bridge connecting them, and the river running wide and grey between.
Budapest is a city with a complicated relationship with its own grandeur. The architecture is imperial and enormous — the Parliament building is one of the largest in the world — but the city wears it with a certain weariness, as though it remembers what came after the empire and hasn't entirely recovered. That quality, that slight melancholy beneath the beauty, is part of what makes it so compelling.
Soak in the Széchenyi thermal baths. Walk the Great Market Hall. Eat lángos from a street stall and drink Tokaji wine at a ruin bar in the Jewish Quarter. And take the time to cross the river in both directions — Buda and Pest are genuinely different cities, and both deserve your attention.
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Ljubljana & Zagreb (LJU / ZAG) — The Underrated Middle
As the route moves southeast through Slovenia and Croatia, you enter territory that many Western travellers still overlook — which is precisely what makes it worth your time.
Ljubljana, the Slovenian capital, is compact, walkable, and genuinely charming: a castle on a hill, a river running through the old town, and a café culture that punches well above the city's size. Zagreb, just two hours further by rail, has a similar energy — a Central European city with a strong identity, excellent museums, and a food scene that has quietly become one of the best in the region.
Neither city is on the VSOE itinerary, but independent travellers retracing the corridor should not skip them.
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Belgrade (BEG) — Where East Begins to Show
Belgrade does not try to be pretty. It is a city that has been destroyed and rebuilt so many times — by Romans, Ottomans, Austro-Hungarians, and twentieth-century wars — that it has simply stopped worrying about appearances and gotten on with being alive.
The result is one of the most energetic cities in Europe. The fortress of Kalemegdan sits at the confluence of the Sava and Danube rivers, and the view from its ramparts is genuinely stirring. The Skadarlija district is the old bohemian quarter, full of cobblestones and live music and restaurants that will keep you at the table far longer than you planned. And the nightlife — Belgrade's nightlife is, by most accounts, the best on the continent.
This is also the point on the journey where the landscape begins to shift, where the architecture starts to carry Ottoman traces, and where you begin to feel, unmistakably, that you are heading somewhere different.
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Sofia (SOF) — The Quiet Capital
Bulgaria's capital is often the least-discussed stop on the Orient Express corridor, which is unfair. Sofia has a layered, complicated history written in its architecture: Roman ruins sit beneath an Orthodox cathedral, which sits beside a Soviet-era ministry building, which sits across from a mosque. It is a city that has absorbed a great deal and processed none of it neatly, and that makes it fascinating.
The Alexander Nevsky Cathedral is the obvious landmark — a vast, gold-domed structure that dominates the city centre. But the real pleasure of Sofia is in its smaller details: the mineral water fountains where locals fill bottles, the covered market at the Central Hali, the neighbourhood of Lozenets where the city's creative class has quietly set up shop.
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Thessaloniki (SKG) — The Southern Branch
The Simplon Orient Express ran a branch line south from Belgrade through Skopje to Thessaloniki and Athens — and if you have the time to follow it, you should.
Thessaloniki is Greece's second city and, by many measures, its most interesting one. It lacks Athens' monuments but more than compensates with its food, its energy, and its extraordinary layering of Byzantine, Ottoman, and Jewish history. The waterfront promenade is one of the great places to spend an evening in southern Europe. The markets around Modiano and Kapani are chaotic and wonderful. And the city's reputation as the gastronomic capital of Greece is, if anything, undersold.
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Athens (ATH) — The Southern Terminus
At the end of the southern branch, Athens waits — ancient, chaotic, and endlessly rewarding.
The Acropolis needs no introduction, but it still manages to exceed expectations. See it at opening time, before the heat and the crowds, and you will understand why people have been making the journey for two and a half thousand years. The National Archaeological Museum is one of the finest in the world. The neighbourhood of Monastiraki hums with energy from morning to midnight.
But Athens also rewards the unhurried visitor who wanders into Koukaki or Pangrati, eats grilled octopus at a taverna with no English menu, and takes the tram to the coast for a swim. It is a city that gives more the longer you stay.
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Istanbul (IST) — The End of the Line
And then, after days of motion and landscape and accumulated impressions, you arrive.
Istanbul is not a destination so much as an experience that takes time to metabolize. It is the only city in the world that spans two continents, and it carries that fact lightly, as though it has simply never occurred to anyone that this might be unusual.
The Hagia Sophia — built as a cathedral in 537 AD, converted to a mosque, then a museum, then a mosque again — is one of the few buildings in the world that genuinely earns the word awe. The Grand Bazaar is overwhelming in the best possible way. The Bosphorus, seen from a ferry at sunrise, is one of those views that recalibrates your sense of scale.
Eat everything. Wander Beyoğlu and Karaköy. Cross to the Asian side for a morning. Drink tea on a rooftop and watch the minarets go pink in the evening light.
The Orient Express brought you here across a continent. Take your time leaving.
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Retracing the Route Today
The Belmond Venice Simplon-Orient-Express operates seasonal departures between London/Paris and Venice, with occasional extended journeys to Budapest, Prague, and Istanbul. It is an experience unto itself — the restored 1920s carriages, the dining car, the dress code — but it comes at a significant price point.
Independent travellers can retrace the full corridor by rail for a fraction of the cost, using Eurail or point-to-point tickets through Trainline or the national rail operators of each country. The journey from Paris to Istanbul by independent rail takes roughly three to four days with overnight trains and day connections, and it is entirely doable with a little planning.
Either way, the cities are the same. The route is the same. The sense of crossing a continent under your own power, watching the landscape change outside the window, is the same.
Carry the Journey With You
The Orient Express route is more than a train journey — it is a crossing of cultures, centuries, and landscapes that stays with you long after you've unpacked. Whether you travel it in a restored 1920s carriage or piece it together one overnight train at a time, the cities will do the rest.
Explore the YHM Designs collection and find something to mark the journey.
