“The Healthy”
Old name: Litros
In the western suburb of Bayrampaşa, Esenler is the site of one of Turkey’s biggest and busiest bus stations and certainly the biggest and busiest in İstanbul. It’s easy to reach by a combination of tram and Metro, with the Otogar Metro station right in the centre of an oval ring of ticket offices.
The Metro station is full of small lokantas serving quick meals for travellers. Here, too, there are small shops selling snacks suitable for a journey, clothes and an astonishing number of telephones.
Some of the bigger companies such as Metro and Pamukkale have waiting rooms with toilet facilities above their ticket offices. Otherwise you’ll be stuck with the none-too-salubrious public facilities in the towers at the corners of the ticket-office blocks.
Traditionally, the area immediately surrounding the Otogar has not been the safest and it was unwise to wander out of the bus station even if you did have a long wait. The situation has improved recently as large shops such as Koçtaş and Bauhaus opened branches right beside it. The big Forum Shopping Mall is just one stop back along the Metro line at Kocatepe and features a range of places to eat as well as shop.
Buses leave the Otogar at a frantic pace with services to Ankara and a few other cities at least every half-hour. Unfortunately there is no central information centre which means having to contact each individual bus company for information separately. The companies are often in hot competition with each other which means that they won’t necessarily tell you if another firm is offering the service that they are not. Of course these days most people will book their tickets on their phones anyway.
Transport info
The Otogar Metro station is accessible from Aksaray. To get there from Sultanahmet you need to take the tram to Yusufpaşa and change to the Metro. With a lot of luggage you may prefer to change from the tram to the Metro at Zeytinburnu where the stations are conveniently side by side – at Yusufpaşa you’ll have to carry your bags up and down the steps of an underpass to get to Aksaray Metro station. From Taksim you take the funicular down to Kabataş to board the tram.
