The Danube Read online

  I stand beside it in the park, and its long shadow of rhomboid shapes stretches out across fresh mown grass, past a short policeman.

  The Danube at Eselnița at dawn is calm as a millpond. This is more lake than river, and at thirty metres deep it is the inverse of Brâncuşi's tower. There are no coincidences in engineering, or in nature.

  Doru Oniga's little hotel is built partly on the shore, partly on the river itself, with a floating landing stage. I lower myself slowly into the water of the Danube for the first time on this journey. It is summer now, but the water is cool. Swallows flit over my head, so close to the water their wings almost break the surface. And I swim slowly upstream, towards the Iron Gates. Wooded hills slope steeply down to the river, which narrows all the way to the gorge where the slopes turn to cliffs. There's a little church at the base, like the churches of Meteora in Greece, but at the base, not the top of a pinnacle of rock. The water reflects the clouds and only a thin line separates the identical halves. There are two smudged suns; the whole morning is like an egg, sculpted by Brâncuşi, with a double yoke. Back in my room I open a slim copy of the poems of George Seferis at the following verse:

  we thought we knew

  there were beautiful islands

  somewhere round here

  close by

  perhaps here

  or a little further on

  no – just here

  where we are groping.15

  After breakfast, Doru's son Nicolae takes me upriver by boat. We pass the church, built in the 1990s to replace ‘the church under the water’, lost when the dam was constructed. According to my Guide to the Romanian Orthodox Monastic Establishments, the original church was dedicated to the Prophet Elijah.16 ‘Throughout its long-lasting history, the monastery suffered years of appalling hardships: ravages inflicted by a host of invaders, obsequious offerings required by dire circumstances, foreign autocratic domination, and, in the long run, the hostility of nature itself (it was flooded by the waters of the Danube River).’ A perfect recipe, then, for a life devoted to prayer. Several winters' supply of firewood is stacked high as a wall beneath the church, and an icon is painted on the white wall facing the river, of Christ in a golden cloud blessing his disciples as he rises to heaven from a landscape of spruce trees. These give a rather Balkan, rather than Middle Eastern, flavour to the picture. Above the words ‘Manastirea Mracuna’, Romanian and European Union flags, divided by a large cross, are painted on the wall. The octagonal dome and the pointed roof, less than twenty years old, are already rusting. Hanging baskets of red, white and pink flowers line the terrace outside the monks' quarters. Perched at the end of the narrow straits of the Danube, the church blesses travellers on their way.

  Upstream from the church, the bulbous features of Decebal, moustachioed and wide-eyed, have been carved into the rock face, forty metres high and twenty-five wide. The ancient Dacian leader stares across the river at the opposite cliff. The words Decebalus Rex, Dragan Fecit (Decebal the king, Dragan made it) are carved into the rock beneath his face.17 The cliff rising above his head into the wooded slope provides him with the illusion of a huge forehead, or a pointed wizard's hat. The Romanian businessman who commissioned the work in the early twentieth century, Iosif Constantin Dragan, tried to persuade the Serbs to sculpt the face of Hadrian, facing Decebal across the river, but the Serbs refused – they have their own, more recent heroes, and do not share that identification with Decebal which many Romanians profess. Even Decebal is unfinished – Iosif Dragan ran out of money.

  Navigation through this stretch of the Danube was once the most treacherous on the whole river. As the Danube forced its way through these mountains over tens of thousands of years, it lined its bed with the jagged rocks it tore from the limestone cliffs in its path. The Danube falls by several metres over a short stretch of only a hundred kilometres, and the combined effect on the water of the rocks on the bed and the sharp gradient of the river came to be known as ‘the boilers’. If the journey downriver by boat was a helter-skelter race to dodge the rocks beneath and along the shore, the journey upriver was even more dangerous.18 Hadrian solved the problem by building a road, carved deep into the cliff face, to bring his legions from Rome to confront the Dacians. The road was dug by slave labour, like Gheorgiu-Dej's canal to the Black Sea from Cernavodă. The road was used from the seventeenth century onwards by teams of horses, to pull ships loaded with salt or grain upriver – the first towpath on the Danube. Only with the advent of steam ships and paddle steamers in the 1830s could larger ships manoeuvre upriver with ease. How the Argo must have struggled through here, the men at the row-locks, worshipping and simultaneously hating Medea and Jason, the lovers in the bow, as they strained upriver, the golden fleece draped around the mast, the sails pulled down to prevent the sudden, strange winds of the gorge tugging the ship to its doom.

  Nicolae steers his motorboat under a cluster of acacia trees overhanging the water, and we step tentatively ashore, into the Veterans cave. The rock vaults overhead like the gateway of a cathedral, such as Salisbury or Cologne. A glorious ray of sunlight bursts like a spotlight through the roof. I sit on my dusty throne in brilliant sunlight, in the epicentre of the velvet darkness. It feels like the end of a journey. I could stay here forever. The cave got its name from the Austrian soldiers who set up camp here in the dying decades of the Ottoman empire in the nineteenth century, to harry passing Ottoman ships – western pirates, attacking the galleys of the Empire of the East. A little further upriver is the Ponicova cave. There is a treacherous footpath down to this one from the road on the other side of the mountain. The Danube is only two hundred metres wide at this point, to Serbia on the far shore. In Ceauşescu's time this was famous as an escape route from communist Romania. So many men and women attempted the treacherous crossing that the Romanian authorities posted border -guards permanently in the cave. Some escapees were shot as they swam; others were caught by Yugoslav border guards when they made it to the far shore and returned to Romania to receive their punishment – several years' hard labour. Yet others escaped detection, or were fortunate with the border -guard they encountered, who let them quietly pass. Yugoslavia was a much more open country than Romania, and there was a good chance they could continue their journey to the West from there, especially if they had friends to help them. I met the owner of a pizzeria in Constanța once, who had escaped Romania from here in the early 1980s. He made his way to New York, and worked his way up from dish-washer to restaurant owner. After the revolution he returned to Constanța and now has his own business empire.19 The Tui Mozart passenger cruiser, registered in Valletta, Malta, roars by downriver. I hope they have someone on board to tell the passengers the story of these caves.

  The Iron Gates might actually be better named the Iron Gateway – there is no gate to block the way, just the sixty-kilometre passage from the plains of the Lower Danube behind me to those of Serbia, Croatia and Hungary ahead. Travelling through the gates, by road or boat, I have the sense of an umbilical cord. The river is very deep here – as deep as the ledges off the Black Sea coast at the Danube mouth. It is exhilarating to be trapped between cliffs, with so much water below and sky above. The richly wooded undergrowth of the slopes on either side of the river provides a special climate for all kinds of plants, and wildlife, especially for snakes, the most ancient symbol of the Danube.

  On the pontoon of Doru's Danube Star Hotel, a former chief engineer in the Romanian merchant navy, Gabriel Florescu, a guest of the hotel, talks about his years at sea. Now he's the head of the harbour in Constanța, but often comes to Eselnița. He used to take cargoes of timber to Britain in the early 1990s when the forests of the Carpathians were being decimated for export. The propeller of his ship broke once, off Plymouth, on a wreck left from the Second World War. They limped all the way up the coast to North Shields to get it repaired. The Meanogorsk, flying a Ukrainian blue and yellow flag, goes upstream towards the boilers. Carrying grain, Gabriel says, or steel. The
cargo is buried deep in the hold, and the hull is deep in the water as we watch through our binoculars. It slows at the approach to the ‘small boilers’, then takes the narrow channel close to the left bank. ‘It can rain in Orşova, but we don't feel a drop here,’ Doru says. ‘The wind blasts through the Gates, deflecting the rain up to Bǎile Herculane – the Baths of Hercules.’ It suddenly gets cool, at eight in the evening. It is hard to believe, sitting here watching it, that such a huge river can squeeze through such a narrow gap. Beneath the pontoon, the large head of a catfish hangs as a trophy. The fish was more than a hundred kilos in weight and nearly three metres long when Doru trapped it in the shallows beneath his hotel. He drives me up the valley to Bǎile Herculane. From here, there are daily trains to my home in Budapest. The town got its name from a myth relating to the Greek god Hercules, who slew a dragon in a cave nearby. The domed roof of the railway station is decorated with enormous frescoes of the man in action. It was not an easy fight, even for a god, and Hercules was badly wounded in the encounter.20 Fortunately there were healing springs to hand. And that may be the main point of the story – not how Hercules slew the dragon, but how he was healed of his wounds. The thermal springs were also tapped by the Roman armies to heal their sore feet after their long march from Rome. The water pours out of the rock at 54 degrees Celsius, and has to be cooled to 37 degrees to be used. Like Karlovy Vary in Bohemia and Héviz in Hungary, the town developed as a fashionable holiday resort in the nineteenth century, made possible by the opening of the railway line through the mountains to Timişoara in 1878. The Cerna river flows steeply down through a thickly forested valley. The name means ‘black’ but the colour of the water is red, because of all the iron in the rocks. The forests, and the woods on either side of the Danube, are especially famous not only for their snakes but also for their turtles. ‘Poor turtles,’ wrote Brâncuşi, ‘they crawl along so close to the devil, but whenever they put their heads out of their shells, they risk being trodden on by God.’21

  On the Danube shore, I talk to a man herding a few cows along the road. Aleksa Jorsa is sixty-five and used to drive sixteen tonne trucks, carrying coal down to the harbour in Tisovița, now lost beneath the waves. ‘I was born by the Danube, but we were not allowed to swim in it because of the border. The shore was like a no-man's-land; we could see it, but not get close to it.’ The river often froze over before the dam was built, but not any more. In the old days, the army blew up the ice to get the floes running again, as at Nikopol. He misses Ada Kaleh, which he used to admire across the water, but only went there once, when he was aged nine or ten, on a school trip. He remembers the candies best, the nuts and sweets. Everyone was sorry when the island was destroyed, along with grazing land his family owned beside the river. Nonetheless he is nostalgic for the communist years because everyone had work. Now he supports his daughter and her two children on his pension alone. This is a beautiful place, he agrees, but all the youngsters leave because there is little chance of finding work.

  Electricity pylons, painted yellow and black, cluster near the Iron Gates dam like football supporters, impatient to get into the stadium before the match. A group of German bikers queues to have their photographs taken in front of a ‘no photography’ sign, and are moved on by angry policemen, incensed by ridicule of the power of the state. The dam itself has twelve gates, flanked by massive concrete walls. It is a structure of which the Romans would have been proud, and reminds me that I am a barbarian at heart. There is little traffic over the top. The Serbian customs post on the far side is decorated with two ‘Wanted’ posters – the grinning, clean-shaven features of the Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladić and the bearded, brooding face of Goran Hadžić, indicted for the killing of 271 hospital inmates in Vukovar in 1991.22

  The Ottoman fortress of Fetislam lies right on the Danube shore, a little outside Kladovo. Several fishermen have spread their nets and their ragged shirts to dry between the crumbling arches. They have unrolled mattresses in what must once have been the guardrooms and live like Gypsies for months at a time, selling their catch, and saving money to take home. Lime trees and mulberry bushes push up between the ruins. From the battlements of the fortress I can just make out the ruins of Trajan's bridge on the far side.23 What was once the most important and imposing structure of the whole region is now dwarfed by giant grain silos, cranes, cruiseboats, and the ragged skyline of Turnu Severin. ‘How sad,’ wrote the German traveller Helmuth von Moltke in the 1830s, ‘that the Roman bridges have not survived. I believe that below Regensburg, not a single stone bridge crosses the river, below Vienna no strong bridge, and beneath Peterwardein (Novi Sad) not a single bridge of any description. This bridge (at Kladovo) would have been the only permanent crossing point for three hundred miles, if it had not been destroyed by those who built it, to protect themselves from the Goths.’24

  The museum at Kladovo is divided into two sections: Roman and Prehistoric. There are chunky, hexagonal floor bricks, the rusting blades of Roman and barbarian swords, a frieze of Trajan and his men on the Danube shore in front of their fine bridge, and an image of the god Mithras in white marble, with a cruel mouth and what looks like shaving foam bubbling out of his head. There is also a frieze of the ritual slaughter of a bull – part of the initiation rites of the followers of Mithras.25 The other half of the museum contains replicas of the astonishing fish-gods or goddesses of Lepenski Vir, forty kilometres upriver. When the decision was taken to build the dam, archaeologists were given three years to find what they could before the precious sites along the banks disappeared beneath the flood waters. From 1965 to 1969, the Serbian archaeologist Dragoslav Srejović excavated several Mesolithic settlements. His most amazing discoveries were at Lepenski Vir.26 Fifty-four huge, egg-shaped stones, with half-human, half fish-like faces were found on terraces above the river. Most were placed among the foundations of trapezoid dwellings – guardians of the hearth, facing the doorway and the river. The floors of the houses were made of violet-red stone, fragmented into triangular tiles. Each of the heads has a stern face, their mouth turned down at the edges, as though by the strain of the current of the river, and large, bulbous eyes. Srejović named them Danubius, the Family Founder, the Forefather, the Fairyman. Marija Gimbutas saw in the symbols engraved around the faces, the zig-zags, chevrons and labyrinths, evidence of goddesses rather than of gods, of fish-women and ancestresses.27 Others have non-human features – ‘the Deer in the Wood’, ‘Last Sight’ and ‘Chronos’.

  Whoever the people who once lived here were, the settlement shows little sign of attack or defence. The same village seems to have existed here for three thousand years, its inhabitants living peacefully on fish and game. A huge cliff face, known as the Big Rock, faces it across the Danube. Only at the very end, around 3500 BC, are there signs of destruction by fire. There are other peculiarities. The bodies of newborn children were buried beneath the floors of the houses. Adults were buried with their bodies oriented to the flow of the Danube, their heads pointing downstream. Srejović's fellow archaeologist Ljubinka Babović describes Lepenski Vir as a place of worship, divided into night and day sanctuaries, a Stonehenge of the Danube.28

  A northerly wind blows off the Danube, making the mid-summer heat in Kladovo more bearable. Boys run down to the water with the huge, inflated inner tubes of tractor tyres, and plunge into the water after them – diving platforms, or bouncy castles. Their older brothers keep their distance, waist deep in the water, concentrating on the more serious business of catching fish, their long lines cast far out into the stream. Just down from the dam, this is the last place on my journey where sturgeon can still be found in the river. The former caviar factory in Kladovo is defunct. There are actually two dams, Iron Gates I and II. Kladovo is near the top of the storage lake created by Iron Gates II, which opened in 1984 – an eighty-kilometre long stretch of near-stagnant water, except when the great locks are opened at either end. My son Matthew has joined me for this stretch of the journey, and I
try out his skateboard on the walkway beside the river. The wheels make a loud noise on the tarmac. At least I can now add the humble skateboard to the list of means of transport I have used, travelling up along the shoulders of the old Danube.

  On the shore at Kladovo is a simple stone monument to Jewish refugees from central Europe, to whom the town offered shelter in the spring of 1940. ‘In this place from January to September 1940 the only safe harbour existed for one thousand Austrian and Central European Jews, on their way to the Holy Land – all victims of the Nazis,’ reads a bronze plaque. They had set out from Bratislava on boats down the Danube, trying to reach the Black Sea, then cross through the Bosphorus and the eastern Mediterranean to Palestine. When the authorities prevented them from continuing their journey, the Federation of Jewish Communities found extra boats for them to stay in, moored to the shore in Kladovo. Eventually 207 immigration certificates were issued for Palestine, for young people aged fifteen to seventeen. They were able to continue their journey by train, through Yugoslavia, Greece, Turkey, Syria and Lebanon, in March 1941.29 The following month the Germans occupied Yugoslavia, and all the others were killed in, or on the way to, concentration camps. There was just one survivor. In the autumn of 1944, as the Soviet Black Sea fleet sailed up the Danube, the retreating Germans sank all 130 of their naval ships in lines across the Danube, to slow the Soviet advance.30 Most were removed, but one appeared from the depths in the summer of 2003, during the same drought which caused such problems at the Cernavodǎ nuclear power station in Romania.31