The drawing of a stylized lion’s head dominates the small booth reserved for Arthere — a collective of Turkish and Syrian artists — at Contemporary Istanbul, the city’s huge art fair that brings together dozens of galleries from New York to Tehran to Istanbul every September.

The drawing — black, red and green ink on paper — is called “Haydarpasa,” named after the 19th-century railway station that formed one of the stops of the Orient Express. The lion’s head, with its droopy eyes and all-too-symmetrical mane, is found on the stained-glass windows of the station built during the reign of strategic-minded Abdulhamid II, as the starting point of the Hejaz Railway. Located on the Asian side of Istanbul, the station was designed and built by two German architects — Otto Ritter and Helmuth Cuno — in neo-Renaissance style.

“It is this motif, common in Western architecture, that you see in the Haydarpasa station’s stained glass windows,” explains Omar Berakdar, a Syrian artist who has made Istanbul his home for the last five years. “Haydarpasa is the crossroads between east and west, a symbol of mobility as demonstrated by the Orient Express that takes off from Aleppo, stops at Istanbul and leads to Europe.”

Berakdar’s drawing can be interpreted as a eulogy to the destroyed city of Aleppo — the city where Agatha Christie wrote “Murder at the Orient Express” — and an acknowledgment of lost mobility of the Syrian artists who, as refugees, have little opportunity to travel and work wherever they want.