Blue River, Black Sea

by Andrew Eames

  The wine did the same for me, knocking all the power out of my legs and turning the slightest incline into a struggle against the rapids, but then this wasn’t the place to be going fast. From Spitz onwards the valley was suffused with well-being and bathed in beauty. Strung with vineyards like a green harp, its music was the gentle clink of glasses in hidden terraces and the murmur of conversation. Gone was the coarse bonhomie of the schnapps-fuelled Radlertreff.

  Eventually I arrived in Dürnstein, the honeypot of Wachau tourism, a primped and pretty place that raised itself high on a spit of land, forced a giant bend into the river, and commanded the main road to get down on its knees and kiss the hem of its skirt before disappearing into a tunnel underneath. Its houses were of painted plaster and stucco and daubed with geranium windowboxes, its new schloss was a five-star hotel and its main road was lined with Gasthöfe, art galleries and shops that sold local wine and everything you could ever make (and didn’t know you even could) with apricots. Every hour or so a new cruise boat docked on the river below, sending a tidal wave of visitors up into Dürnstein’s apricot-filled nooks and crannies. By evening they were gone, cradling their apricot-scented moisturizers, and the air became good enough to eat. Cooking smells mingled with grape must, woodsmoke and the perfumes of dressed-up dinner guests, and every hour the church bells set up a conversation with other hidden churches up and down the river, until eventually Dürnstein’s Maria Himmelfahrt Abbey would join in lazily with its richer, deeper tone.

  I was drawn to Maria Himmelfahrt’s waterside bell-tower, which was painted blue and white and covered with statues and reliefs like a delicate piece of china. Starting with cherubs and magi dancing around the figure of Mary, it rose through sky-blue scrolls and saintly figures to obelisks topped with golden globes just below the belltower itself. It was so memorable I couldn’t understand why the style hadn’t caught on elsewhere. Plainly it had been built to impress passing river users at a time when paddlesteaming was all the rage, and it still did, because some weeks after sitting on the riverbank at Dürnstein I found that I shared my admiration for the Maria Himmelfahrt belltower with the piratical-looking first mate of a Serbian freight barge, while we were chugging past the war-damaged shoreline of Vukovar. A strange place to remember a belltower in the Wachau.

  A destination like this needs a good story to provide the words for the brochure, and Dürnstein’s was the tale of Richard the Lionheart and his faithful troubadour, Blondel. Despite his good press in children’s history books, the King of England, Normandy, Anjou and Aquitaine was a bit of a loudmouth who made enemies wherever he went, and he had to return from his Third Crusade incognito through Austria, having deeply offended Habsburg Emperor Leopold by his loutish behaviour on the battlefield. Unfortunately for him, he was recognized, captured and imprisoned in Dürnstein castle. His loyal troubadour Blondel de Neale, realizing that something must have gone wrong when he didn’t turn up at home, wandered through Europe singing his favourite ballads outside every castle, until Richard finally joined in.

  A nice little history, but it says something about the popularity of the King of England, Normandy, Anjou and Aquitaine if, once he goes missing, the only person who goes looking for him is his fool. Not surprising, then, that it took a year before enough money was raised to pay the astronomical ransom for his release.

  Today the castle is a ruin, for which the burghers of Dürnstein are no doubt very grateful. Once the stronghold of robber barons, built as it was on an exposed, steep set of rocks high above the village, it would have cost a king’s ransom to maintain. As it is, its disreputable toothy wall-stubs flicked V-signs at the abbey cloisters and the diminutive cruise ships below, at the thousand-bucket mountain to the west, and at the distant hilltop monastery of Gottweig, the Austrian Montecassino, away to the east. A sojourn up here probably did the arrogant Lionheart no end of good.

  Twenty-four hours later I was incarcerated in a monastery myself, in the heart of the Vienna Woods.

  After Dürnstein, without the valley walls to shore everything up, the Wachau quickly unravelled. For a short stretch the vineyards were no longer charmingly mom-and-pop, but became disappointingly corporate and overalled men leaning on tractors talked to be-suited men leaning on Mercedes, representing opposite ends of the same organization. And then there was Krems, a handsome town where modern life snapped its fingers once again, dispelling the magical indolence of a vine-strung couple of days.

  I ignored the glowering hilltop monastery at Gottweig and turned south, heading inland for the Wienerwald ‘Vienna Woods’, picked up by a following wind that had me longing for sails. But the Vienna Woods turned out to be growing on Viennese hills, so in the end I put my bike on a local train which took me to within pedalling range of Heiligenkreuz.

  It was a diversion made with a purpose. Patrick Leigh Fermor had interspersed his staying in castles and under bushes (‘There is much to recommend moving straight from straw to a four-poster, and then back again’) with a couple of overnights in monasteries, so I was keen to try the same. The question was, who would have me? It’s not as if there was a shortage of monasteries along the Danube, particularly in Austria, but several things had singled out Heiligenkreuz (Holy Cross) from those I’d cycled past over the last weeks. For a start it had a thriving population of eighty monks, whereas even the likes of the giant Benedictine abbey of Melk, despite being a much-visited, gloriously decorated building looming over the river, had a mere half-dozen. That made Heiligenkreuz the largest Cistercian monastery in Europe, bucking the trend of decline in most such institutions, and as a result it was about to receive a visit from the Pope. Moreover, its abbot was another aristocrat whose family had been much affected by war and whose nephew had just won an Oscar for a film about life in Stasi-dominated East Germany.

  Stift Heiligenkreuz sat like a sprawling schloss at the heart of its own little village laid out in a series of courtyards, each less public than the last, with a theological college in one and a restaurant in another where you could order a healthy Holy Cross Salad, followed by more sinful desserts. The monastery buildings were more solid than they were massive, the copper gutters gleaming, the plain walls in the process of re-creaming, and the steep roof mottled with light and dark tiles and studded with the dormer windows of monks’ cells. From one of them came the sound of a trumpet, played with skill.

  Five giant plane trees stood in the central courtyard. Its western side was filled with the Romanesque abbey church, and its focal point was a highly ornamental baroque fountain topped with spouting eagles. Here I found Brother Samuel, a small, bearded, smiling, softly spoken monk who walked me to the guest quarters.

  ‘I used to be a journalist too,’ he confessed. ‘On a motorcycle magazine.’

  It sounded so unlikely that it had to be true.

  ‘You didn’t enjoy it?’

  ‘I found it a struggle to stay alive,’ said Brother Samuel, still smiling. Somehow I knew he wasn’t talking about the dangers of oncoming traffic.

  ‘So this is … better?’ I said lamely.

  ‘Now I have no doubts,’ he smiled even more broadly. ‘My faith gets deeper and the experience becomes more intense every day.’

  ‘Ah. I see.’ I didn’t, but nor did I want to seem at odds with my surroundings.

  He showed me my room, which was equipped with leaflets about how to become a monk and had a supply of holy water by the door for anointing myself whenever I needed strength to go out and face the world. There he ran through the monastic routine and checked that I didn’t need to speak to a priest, which I didn’t (I couldn’t say I’d had all my spiritual needs satisfied by a fat 30,000-year-old stone goddess).

  I’ve not met many abbots, so I wasn’t sure about the protocol: should I give him a high five or kneel to kiss his signet ring? Happily Abbot Gregor Ulrich von Henckel Donnersmarck turned out to be a calm, massive presence who would probably have taken either in his stride, but seemed content just to shake hands. He loo
ked like a leaner Helmut Kohl, but for a slightly wandering eye which he would close in bright light, and he had a quiet decisiveness about him that would probably be very hard to resist in any walk of life. I found it easy to imagine him in the corporate office of an international freight forwarder, where I knew he had started his adult life.

  ‘Ah yes,’ he admitted. ‘I am an abbot with an MBA. There are not many of us about.’

  The Henckel Donnersmarcks had been members of the pre-war German aristocracy whose major landholdings had been in Silesia, one of those territories, like the Sudetenland, from where the German population had been evicted at the end of the war. Most of their property had been handed over to Poland in the post-war redrawing of borders. Gregor had been primed by his family for a life in business, but he’d also had a very Catholic upbringing, and the idea of taking holy orders at the age of thirtyfour had come quite naturally to him. ‘I liked being a forwarding agent, but it wasn’t my vocation,’ he said. I resisted a cheap joke about forwarding souls to God.

  As we walked through the older parts of the monastery he agreed that his business experience had its uses. Heiligenkreuz had two hundred employees and owned several houses in Vienna, together with 20,000 hectares of forest (more than Archduke Alex) and one of the larger vineyards in Austria.

  ‘Run by monks?’ Cistercians, being a Benedictine order, believe in redemption through work.

  ‘We try to do our best in all areas, but it is important to find the right people to work for us as managers.’ In the end it wasn’t too dissimilar to the sort of estate he might have been controlling if the family had held on in Silesia.

  I asked whether the land-holdings were increasing or diminishing.

  ‘In terms of hectares we have more than a hundred years ago, but in value, that’s different. It is important to sell expensive land for development and buy other cheaper land for agriculture,’ pronounced the abbot, wearing his business hat.

  ‘And do you have an oversight of everything?’

  ‘I attend meetings with the heads of my departments, but my main interest is in the spiritual life of the community.’ I sensed he wanted to steer conversation away from all this talk of commerce, but I had one more question.

  ‘Is it profitable?’ It certainly looked to be so, judging by the condition of all the buildings.

  ‘Let us just say that we don’t have enough money to realize all the projects we’d like to do at the moment.’

  And then, as if to emphasize the transience of the flesh, he made a point of stopping by the abbey’s death chapel, where all the monks were eventually laid out amongst funereal baroque. ‘I like to pass this and think that I will lie here one day.’

  Heiligenkreuz was founded by French Cistercians back in the twelfth century, and was one of few monasteries in Austria with an unbroken history all the way through to the present. Accordingly its rather bland and stolid exterior hid a delicate Romanesque cloister, a sombre Chapter House and a lovely Fountain House with a sixteenth-century Roman fountain surrounded by stained glass.

  ‘I take it you don’t wash in here any longer?’

  The abbot shook his head. ‘These days everyone has their own facilities, en suite. I find it important to be clean.’

  The Romanesque monastery church was a pleasure to an eye tired of all the florid baroque that lined the Upper Danube. It had a rough-hewn simplicity, with simple unornamented arches, stout columns, and no stained glass in the nave. Its softly lit, monochrome austerity could easily have belonged to a small late-Romanesque chapel in the foothills of the Pyrenees, not to a powerful and wealthy Austrian monastery in the Vienna Woods. Its simplicity was altogether more in keeping with my concept of how a monastic existence should be than all that sumptuous baroque, and I said so.

  The abbot agreed. ‘One of the reasons I am here is the spirituality of the medieval architecture,’ he murmured. ‘But we do have our baroque, too.’

  And he showed me the Refectory. Ornamental in the extreme, it was so rich and sweet that it looked like the interior of a Baked Alaska, although the meals themselves were more austere. Lunch and dinner were taken here in silence while someone read news from the Catholic world from the pulpit, after which one of the more senior monks would give a sign, and the community could talk.

  ‘So you’re not really silent at all?’

  ‘Only at designated times.’ The monks had radios, access to TV, the Internet, novels and newspapers. ‘In fact I remember reading a review of this writer you are following in one of our newspapers,’ said the abbot. ‘What is his name?’

  I gave him chapter and verse about PLF, and how the books had recently been translated into German. The abbot wrote the details into a notebook he produced from within the folds of his gown, and said he would make sure to head for a bookshop next time he was in town.

  A distant bell tolling somewhere within the depths of the monastery reminded him of the next stage of the liturgical day, so I asked the abbot quickly about the Pope’s forthcoming visit.

  ‘Why here?’

  ‘Because I invited him.’

  I knew it wasn’t as simple as that, and the abbot admitted, when pushed, that Heiligenkreuz’s thriving monastic population probably had something to do with it, at a time when most European monasteries had a handful of increasingly elderly monks. He partly ascribed that success to the presence of the theological college on site, some of whose students elected for a meditative life over that of becoming a parish priest. But more controversially, Heiligenkreuz had also chosen to return to a Latin liturgy. It was said to have more spirituality and musicality than the German version, but I was aware it had also antagonized the Jewish world by its suggestion that Jews live in blindness and darkness, and that they need to be converted. These sentiments were not unrelated to Pope Benedict’s own quotation of strong words about Islam. However, the liturgy was a subject unlikely to come up in any serious discussions during the Pope’s visit, said the abbot, principally because of shortage of time. ‘You will have to attend our services and decide for yourself.’

  Over the next twenty-four hours I did just that. The monastic day began at 5 a.m., and there were seven celebrations in the abbey church spread through the next fifteen hours. I didn’t attend them all, but for once it was good to have a timetable which was not of my own setting. It was hypnotic to sit in the congregation – there were rarely more than a handful of us – and witness the white-robed community file into the tall, carved-walnut choir stalls, like the ivories taking up their positions on a giant piano keyboard. There they tossed their cuffs as they opened their prayer books and rocked back and forth as they instinctively, without apparent leadership, filled the nave with sound. In that soft light, under those 900-year-old arches, their voices became a musical instrument that had its own separate existence, independent of their bodies. And in this way, seven times a day, they celebrated their unity, reaffirmed their spirituality and communicated all of that, and more, to their God. Even though I understood none of it (and wouldn’t have related to much of it even if I had), it was impossible to sit in the stalls and not feel some of their inner peace.

  That evening, out in the courtyard after Compline, long after the last candle had been extinguished and all the monks had filed away to their beds, I could still hear one of their number running through some of the liturgical harmonies alone in his dormer-windowed cell under the eaves. For him, celebrating his faith seven times a day and 365 days a year still wasn’t enough.

  12

  Old Empires, New Nations:

  Vienna to Esztergom

  No matter what Johann Strauss may say, Vienna distrusts the Danube. The Austrian capital sits on a plain which used to flood regularly in winter, when the river would pioneer new branches and blunder at will across a region up to 6 kilometres wide. By the mid-nineteenth century the city fathers were fed up with this irresponsible behaviour, so they drew up a grand scheme that took twenty-five years and 100,000 workers to complete, thrust
ing the Danube into the straitjacket of two giant concrete channels that run through the northern suburbs. Shackling one of these channels is the Freudenau power station, a huge installation where 12 million litres of water per second pass through six turbines with a noise like a jumbo-jet convention.

  Austria has nine hydropower stations sapping the Danube’s power, of which Freudenau is the last and most recent, with a lock system the size of three football stadiums. When required it lights up half of Vienna, but at quieter times its excess electricity can’t be easily stored, so late at night the surplus is used to pump water uphill to reservoirs high up in the mountains. There it can be released during peak periods, so that in theory one extra schoolchild returning home in late afternoon and turning on the Cartoon Network can trigger a giant waterfall in the Alps.

  For me, on my bike, the river’s banishment to the suburbs meant that there was no obvious route into the city centre. Instead I followed the Danube Canal, a lame, tame waterway that threaded under motorway arches where urban graffiti came out to meet me in slogans like ‘Freedom for all children’ and ‘Nothing is certain’, accompanied by white cats, yellow sharks and a man with an exploding head. The graffiti became increasingly apocalyptic as I progressed, with echoes of Meatloaf, Egon Schiele and the Simpsons, until under one arch there were two lads on a stepladder spray-painting an underwater scene. Art students, they said.

  ‘Are you not worried about the police? Where I come from this is classified as vandalism.’

  ‘They’re not interested. Our teachers even suggest we come here. Unofficially of course,’ said the one higher up the ladder. ‘There’s nowhere else we can get such a big surface.’

  ‘But what about those people whose work you’re covering up?’

  ‘If you know who did it, then you don’t cover it,’ said the one below. He gestured around him. ‘A lot of this was done by last year’s students. And they’ve left. Too bad.’