Blanche El Gammal
Dr Blanche el Gammal is a researcher, and holds a PhD (2016) with a thesis entitled: “L’Orient-Express, Configurations Littéraires d’un Mythe Européen” (“The Orient Express, a European Literary Myth”), directed by Professor Guy Ducrey (University of Strasbourg) and Professor Paul Aron (University of Bruxelles). She is currently teaching Literature in Nanterre University, near Paris. In 2014, she was one of the scientific advisors in the exhibition Il était une fois l’Orient Express (Once Upon a Time There was the Orient Express) at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris.
The Orients of the Orient Express
The Orient Express, the most famous train in the world, crossed Europe from Paris to Constantinople. Therefore, it stopped at one of the gates of the continent. However, many images associated to this train are certainly “oriental”. Hence this question: Which Orient, or which Orients are we dealing with? It is simultaneously Eastern Europe, the harems of Constantinople, the geography of Agatha Christie, who took and made her characters take the Taurus Express, an extension of the Orient Express going to Baghdad and Basra in the East, Jerusalem and Cairo in the West. Which of these “Orients” prevails both in reality and in the representations of the train?