Turkey fulfils Ottoman dream with rail tunnel linking Europe with Asia
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Turkey opened the world’s first underwater rail link between two continents yesterday, connecting Asia and Europe and allowing Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan to realize a project dreamt up by Ottoman sultans more than a century ago.
The engineering feat spans 13 kilometers to link Europe with Asia some 60 meters below the Bosphorus Strait. Called the Marmaray, it will carry subway commuters in Europe’s biggest city and eventually serve high-speed and freight trains.
“Today we are realizing the dreams of 150 years ago, uniting the two continents and the people of these two continents,” Erdogan said at the opening, which coincides with the 90th anniversary of the founding of the modern Turkish Republic.
Erdogan has called the 5.5 billion lira (US$2.8 billion) tunnel the project of the century and says it fulfils an age-old “dream of our ancestors.”
Plans for a rail tunnel below the Bosphorus date to at least 1891, when Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid, a patron of public works, had French engineers draft a submerged tunnel on columns that was never built.
Today, the gleaming Marmaray is an immersed tube set in the seabed built by Japan’s Taisei Corp with Turkish partners Nurol and Gama. The bulk of financing came from the Japan Bank for International Cooperation.
“Japan and Turkey are the two wings of Asia. Let us dream together of a high-speed train departing from Tokyo, passing through Istanbul and arriving in London,” said Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who attended the opening.
Turkey plans to spend US$250 billion on roads, energy and IT infrastructure alone over the next decade. Transport Minister Binali Yildirim dismissed the concerns about financing as mere envy.
“Half of the world is at war, the other half is in an economic slowdown, while Turkey is carrying out its big projects,” he said. “There’s no need for this jealousy.”
The Union of Chambers of Turkish Engineers and Architects warned the Marmaray set on a silty seabed 20 kilometers from the active North Anatolian Fault is at risk in case of a large earthquake, which geologists predict may strike within a generation.
But Yildirim described the Marmaray as the “safest structure in Istanbul,” its free-floating structure designed to withstand an earthquake with a magnitude of 9. Interlocking floodgates would seal off each section.
The Marmaray will reduce car traffic by 20 percent in Istanbul, among the world’s most congested, when it eventually carries 1.5 million people a day.
Murat Guvenc, director of the Urban Studies Research Centre at Istanbul Sehir University, said the tunnel will essentially shrink Istanbul, a sprawling metropolis of 15 million people.
“The historical peninsula has remained intact for 25 centuries, like the eye of the storm, because of the natural barriers of the Golden Horn and Bosphorus waterways,” he said. “The Marmaray removes those boundaries.”
Construction of the tunnel on the European side yielded a Byzantine port with more than 13 shipwrecks and thousands of other relics that date back as far as 8,500 years.
The finds nearly doubled the project’s duration and prompted UNESCO to voice concern about threats to the peninsula, a World Heritage site.
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