The Danube Read online

  Those serving the longest sentences were entitled to the least food and the fewest letters from their families. A single letter, censored by the camp authorities, and three kilos of provisions every three months. It was hard to get real information about the outside world or send information of their own. The only safe way was when someone was released. He would be asked to memorise hundreds of messages to relatives of the convicts stuck inside.

  Todor Tsanev survived the long years on Belene, he says, with a lot of faith and a lot of hope. ‘If a person's spirit is broken, that's the end, he is annihilated. You have to believe in the good, and that the bad will finally be over one day. And we younger ones, we always asked for pig fat from home, and we toasted our bread in the morning, on an open fire, and spread pig fat on it, and that was when we talked, and encouraged each other, saying that this will not last forever. And physically, the human body knows what to do. It knows its limits. We had to work, or we would have been killed like dogs, but we worked slowly, we tried to pace ourselves, not to get over-exhausted. You don't need anyone to tell you what to do, you don't need anyone to organise you. Your body knows. And all the time, even if you're not working, you act as if you are. If I hadn't known what to do, I wouldn't be here with you now. And I'm eighty years old! … I don't dream often about Belene any more, though I did for a long time after I was released. Nightmares. Nowadays only rarely, and they're not so bad as they were. For a time I had nightmares every night. Not any more … I try to stay healthy. I walk a lot. I don't have a car. I stay out of politics. I was very active in politics for a while, after 1990, but now I see that everything is lost. There's no way of putting the state back together. Those who say they can are just play-acting.’

  He resents the luxury, the palaces of former communists, and those he calls ‘the mafia’. And he blames the communist leadership for what was done to him, and his country. ‘I don't blame those I knew who gave in to them, who capitulated. I blame those at the top, who ran the whole system. And since that system collapsed, they stayed on, to torture us in the new one!’ There's no true democracy in Bulgaria he concludes.

  I drive slowly back up river, chastened by our meeting.

  2. The Lower-Middle Danube, including the Iron Gates and the plains of Vojvodina.

  CHAPTER 6

  Gypsy River

  Everyone likes to laugh at Roma monkeys … they add colour.

  NIKOLAI KIRILOV1

  The Western knights, with no enemy to fight, treated the whole operation in the spirit of a picnic, enjoying the women and the wines and the luxuries they had brought with them from home, gambling and engaging in debauchery, ceasing in contemptuous fashion to believe that the Turk could ever be a dangerous foe to them.

  PATRICK KINROSS2

  THIRTY KILOMETRES west of Ruse, the first poppies of spring grow beside the architect Kolyo Ficheto's bridge across the Yantra river, which flows down to the Danube from the Stara Planina mountains. To the north, the Danube is fed by the Olt and the Jiu rivers flowing down from the Carpathians. Barn swallows dart beneath the ten handsome stone arches of Ficheto's bridge, and the wavy, broken line built into the stone beneath the parapet gives a sense of movement, a nod towards the majesty of the river flowing beneath it. This was Kolyo Ficheto's trademark, imprinted on almost all the buildings he designed.3 On the Danube shore in Svishtov, the roof of the Church of the Holy Trinity has the same wavy line, as though imitating the waves of the Danube or the Black Sea. The carved ends of the pews in the church at Balatonkenese in Hungary, the floor tiles of a friend's house in Mindszentkálla, have the same, quiet human tribute to the rhythms of nature.

  The heart of the nineteenth-century Bulgarian writer Aleko Konstantinov is preserved in a jar in a museum named after him in Svishtov.4 Next to it is the blood-stained jacket he was wearing when an assassin's bullet ended his life in 1897 at the age of only thirty-six. Konstantinov created the fictional character Bay Ganyo Balkanski, whose adventures were published in his 1895 best-seller Bay Ganyo Goes to Europe. Konstantinov won many enemies with his sarcastic portrayal of a provincial Bulgarian setting out to the West in peasant costume and returning home in elegant West European garb, having learnt the basics of capitalism during his sojourn among the peoples up the Danube, but none of their manners or restraint. ‘While Ganyo is simply a comic, primitive buffoon in the first part of the book that follows his exploits in Europe, he becomes the authentic and dangerous savage only on his return, among his own, where he is the nouveau riche and newly hatched corrupt politician,’ writes Maria Todorova.5 Konstantinov thought up Bay Ganyo on a trip to Chicago for the World Fair in 1893, but the character is based on his own experiences in Bulgaria as a judge, before he quit in disgust at the political corruption of his profession. Konstantinov sought refuge from his life and times in humour, and joined a circle of artists known as ‘Merry Bulgaria’. He wrote under the ironic pseudonym ‘Shtastlivetsa’ – ‘The Happy One’. His family disowned him and he clashed frequently with the authorities, but the character he created lives on to haunt the imagination of Bulgarians finding their way in the European Union, not the ugly caricature of an outsider, mocking their worst characteristics, but of an insider. ‘Critics disagree on whether Bay Ganyo represents “Bulgarianness”. In his character, “national” features are combined with those of any upstart; thus he can also be interpreted as representative of human shamefulness,’ wrote Sonia Kanikova.6 Konstantinov also wrote about the flaws of other societies. His description of his visit to America, To Chicago and Back, was published in 1894. According to Kanikova, ‘he regards the American way of life as anti-human and foresees some of the disastrous effects of technological progress and civilisation’. A soul brother, then, for Momi Kolev at the Koloseum Circus in Ruse.

  Belene, the oversized village where Todor Tsanev suffered so long, presents a double-face to the world. A huge, unfinished nuclear power station lies along the low cliffs like a mortally wounded lion. An endless building site shelters behind a tall fence, decorated with coils of barbed wire. A hundred security guards provide at least a little local labour. ‘Belene NPP – Energy for the Future’ proclaims an information board in the centre of the town. ‘Construction period – 59 months. Design lifetime – 60 years.’ The reality has proved a little harder. Begun in the 1970s, it was abandoned for lack of money in 1990, restarted and abandoned again several times. In January 2013, a referendum called by the opposition Socialist Party aimed at restarting Belene was approved by the public. But the governing party carefully changed the wording at the last minute into support for an unnamed nuclear reactor. Opponents argued that Belene would cost every Bulgarian dear, and that money in the European Union's poorest member state would be better spent on health care, pensions and safer energy.

  Petar Dulev, the mayor of the municipality, is a firm believer in all things nuclear. ‘We always supported construction here. Despite the recent problems in Japan, we believe that nuclear power is the safest and cheapest source of energy, and will provide seven thousand jobs during the construction phase.’ ‘And the prison camp?’ I ask, cruelly. ‘The concentration camp is a black spot on the history of Belene. We try to build our prestige in other ways now. But perhaps in future it will attract tourists here, as a place of commemoration – like Alcatraz.’ As I leave, he presents me with a compact disc of Bulgarian folk songs by a group of local singers called ‘Danubian dawn’, backed by the musicians of Belenka and Dimum. The local paper, Dunavski Novini (Danube News), has a photo of the musicians on the back cover: two accordion players, a violinist and a drummer. The music alternates between the rousing and the melancholy, but is all rather fine. My favourite tracks are ‘Saint George, break in horse’, and ‘Why didn't you come yesterday night, elder brother Maria'ne?’

  A high security prison has replaced one corner of the old, sprawling barracks of the prison camp, and the still undiscovered graves of those who died here. The rest of the island, and some twenty islands which surround it, have
been turned into a national park. Out of the darkness of the past, something green and hopeful seems to be emerging.

  Down on the shore, opposite Belene Island, is an elegant, modern building set on green lawns gently sloping down to the river. Here as much effort is going into preserving and restoring nature as once went into destroying it. The park is part of a World Bank and European Union effort to reduce the load of nutrient pollution in the Black Sea, most of which arrives through the Danube, the Dniester and the Dnieper – the great flush toilets of Europe. Thanks to both the prison and the nature protection area, the twenty or so islands of the Belene archipelago are almost inaccessible to the public, a blessing for shy and rare birds like the white-tailed eagle and the pygmy cormorant that nest there. The park authority's job is to undo the damage caused by decades of forced labour by the inmates of the prison camp – the vast dykes that cut the Danube off from the wetland forests, built at such a cost in human misery, which deprived the fish of the spawning grounds they need and the birds of the fish they need to survive. If Todor Tsanev could see what is happening here, I think he would be glad. A system of sluices and waterways has been built on the island, to allow periodic, controlled flooding. After the first intervention, in 2008, monitors from the park recorded a surge in the number of birds. Whiskered terns, mistle thrushes, purple herons and mute swans appeared as if from nowhere. Floating watermoss, mouse garlic, yellow floating heart, fen ragwort and spring snowflake all flourished in the new conditions.

  ‘A big part of our work is to explain to local people, especially children, why restoring the wetlands is a good idea,’ said Stela Bozhinova, director of the Persina Nature Park.7 ‘Some people understand what we're doing, others resent the fact that we seem to be undoing their life's work, protecting the shoreline from flooding.’ The largest island, Persina, is fifteen kilometres long and six kilometres wide at its fattest point. The water is unusually low for May, which is disappointing for Stela and her team as it makes it harder to flood the forests for any useful length of time. A constant problem for the park is the functioning of the massive Iron Gates dam on the Romanian–Serb border. When water is released at the dam it creates a wave that travels down the river, still sixty to eighty centimetres high when it reaches Belene. That erodes the islands and damages the confluence of tributaries of the Danube such as the Yantra. Even so, the work to nurse the rarest species back from the brink of extinction is bearing fruit. Four of Bulgaria's fourteen white-tailed eagles nest on Persina Island – two adult pairs. This year one nest has two eggs in it, while they have not been able to get close enough to the other to count. If just two chicks survive from each nest, that would mean a nearly 30 per cent increase in Bulgaria's white-tailed eagle population.

  Stela notices climate change in several ways. During the eight years she has worked as director of the park, the Danube has not frozen over once, although this used to be commonplace. But extremes of weather seem to be increasing in other ways, with more sudden storms on the river and wild fluctuations in the water level from one day to the next. Several of her colleagues are away on a field trip downriver in a small boat from Vidin as part of a project to track the numbers of two endangered birds, the sand martin and the little ringed plover, down the whole length of the Danube. We climb up into the observation tower. An olive green military van of the Bulgarian prison service drives a batch of new prisoners over a small bridge on to the island. Everything is green here, even the prison vehicles.

  The Danube flows past Belene like a solid mass, a moving carpet. ‘Its impossible to say exactly how many islands there are,’ says Stela. ‘Some disappear one day, others appear the next.’

  The Danube shore on the right, southern bank is steep, a cliff rising vertically from the water, while the left bank on the Romanian shore is low marshland. The road from Belene descends to the plain of Nikopol, the old Nikopolis. The ruins of the west wall of the Roman fort, built by the emperor Marcus Aurelius in AD 169, crumble gently into oblivion. It was a Roman victory, nike, over the Dacians, forgotten by all except the schoolchildren and tourists in little Danubian museums. A thermal power station on the far bank hisses and roars, periodically releasing an accumulation of steam like a wrestler between rounds. From another chimney, a thin trail of yellow smoke rises, like urine – the shoreline industries of the Romanian town of Turnu Mǎgurele. The sky is restless, and great rolls of black cloud, black as the tarred hulls of fishing boats, swoop down from the Carpathians, though the sun still shines on the Bulgarian shore. A Romanian barge, moored to the dock with its bow upstream, waits for a load of gravel that passes through a long contraption of conveyor belts and chutes. The Danube is strangely calm, reflecting it all. Images of Romanian factories alternate black and white in the colourless river.

  By naming his new town after a particular battle, Marcus Aurelius seems to have set the scene for a spate of decisive battles in the history of the place. On the plains of Nikopolis, the flower of British, French, Dutch, Hungarian and Spanish youth met their doom in 1396 in the last, disastrous crusade, against a disciplined army of Turks and Serbs.8 By all accounts, they rather deserved it. The crusaders, led by King Sigismund of Hungary, were stung into action by the daring raids of the forces of the Turkish sultan, Bayezid the Thunderbolt, from his fortresses at Nikopolis, Lom and Vidin on the Danube. Sigismund and his allies gathered at Buda in May 1386, and ignoring Sigismund's advice, provided on account of knowledge gleaned from his own long rivalry with the Ottomans, took the offensive, marching down the valley of the Danube as far as Nikopolis, looting, pillaging and raping each Christian, Jewish or Muslim community in their path. Fortified by the excellent wines they found on the shores of the Morava river in Serbia, they camped in front of Nikopolis, preparing to annihilate the small Turkish garrison at their leisure. ‘The Western knights, with no enemy to fight, treated the whole operation in the spirit of a picnic,’ writes Patrick Kinross. When Bayezid finally arrived to do battle in November, with a force at least as large as their own, – twice as large according to some accounts – the French troops were so keen to prove themselves in battle, to justify their resentment that the expedition had been placed under Hungarian command, that they charged the enemy against the express orders of the ever-cautious Sigismund. The best report of what happened next comes from a French survivor, Jean Froissart. At the head of the French troops, Philippe d'Elu called to his standard-bearer, ‘Forward banner, in the name of God and Saint George, for they will see me today a good chevalier!’ Seven hundred French cavalry charged uphill, scattering the weak auxiliary troops of the Ottomans. Just beyond the brow of the hill, however, the full force of Bayezid's troops lay in wait. ‘The crusaders were still, by the standards of the time, essentially amateur soldiers, fighting in the past and in a romantic spirit. They had learned nothing of the professional art of war as it progressed through the centuries, none of the military skills of the Turks, with their superior discipline, training, briefing and tactics, and above all the mobility of their light-armoured forces and archers on horseback,’ writes Kinross.9 The men of the last crusade were massacred. After several hours, the remnants of the army split, some fleeing to their boats to sail back up the Danube, others beginning a long march home beside the river and across the Carpathians, where survivors from the villages they had torched on the way took revenge on them. The day after the battle, Bayezid had all ten thousand prisoners executed, except for the Count of Nevers and his entourage who were forced to witness the beheading of their men, one by one, roped together like cattle.

  I meet Vasile Popov by the shore in modern Nikopol, watching the approach of a storm from the north. He's a handsome man in the camouflage jacket favoured by all Balkan men who keep their old leather one for special occasions and whose denim jackets of their youth are now too threadbare, too small, or have been purloined by granddaughters. He also has a fine moustache, slightly reminiscent of Joseph Stalin, but a much kinder smile. His first Danube story is just hearsay, a tale fon
dly told in the town, of how in the bitter winter of 1956, a logjam of ice threatened to destroy Nikopol, forming a solid wall and forcing the river to flood its banks. The Romanian army opened fire with mortars, shattering the ice-flows, which then obediently resumed their passage downriver. The town was saved. Exactly half a century later, during the floods of April 2006, Vasile personally took the President of Bulgaria, Petar Stoyanov, on his boat through the flooded town, to show him the damage and to press the locals’ claims for compensation. That same spring, he took his two daughters to the school graduation ball by boat through the still-flooded streets. The girls stepped elegantly ashore in their long dresses.

  Vasile works for the town council; ‘there's no other work here … apart from the factory making electricity metres, which has already closed.’ Even the foundations of the old factory have been stripped to the bone by the Gypsies, he says, in their hunger for scrap metal. He used to fish from his own boat, and his best catch was a female sturgeon weighing ninety-five kilos, with twenty-two kilos of caviar. The caviar he sold for three hundred dollars a kilo, keeping only a small plateful for himself and his family to taste – ‘fishermen always sell what they can, and keep the worst bits for themselves … I managed to pay for my daughters to finish their education, in mathematics and foreign languages, with that fish,’ he says proudly. But the story has an unhappy ending. The same year, he caught hepatitis from a dirty needle used by the dentist who was fixing his teeth, and spent the rest of the money getting the treatment he needed to combat the illness. He has still not got back his strength. ‘I used to be so strong I could change car tyres by lifting the whole car up with one hand, and replacing the wheel with the other.’ Now he can't even go out fishing any more, has sold his boat, and lives on his two hundred dollars a month salary from the town council. He loves talking about fishing. There was a lake to the west of the town, where large fish, catfish and amur, got trapped by the changes in the level of the river. Men would beat on the water with sticks, while others would wait with nets across the mouth of the narrow channel, which led the water back to the Danube. ‘They jumped like dolphins – straight into our nets,’ he laughs. He also used to catch amur, a big carp-like fish imported into Europe from the Far East, using cherry tomatoes as bait.