Pera Palace Hotel

Pera Palace Hotel stands in the Beyoğlu district of Istanbul, opened in 1895 to accommodate the wealthy travelers arriving on the Orient Express, the luxury train service linking Paris to Istanbul. Designed by the French-Ottoman architect Alexandre Vallaury, its exterior combines neoclassical facades with Art Nouveau ironwork around its elevator and coffee house, while its ballroom draws on Ottoman and oriental decorative motifs. The hotel is closely associated with Agatha Christie, who is said to have written parts of Murder on the Orient Express there and whose former room is preserved as a memorial to her stay, and it later hosted figures including Ernest Hemingway and Graham Greene, both of whom wrote it into their own fiction. A separate room, once used by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk during visits to Istanbul, is maintained today as a small museum devoted to the founder of modern Turkey.