Blue River, Black Sea

by Andrew Eames

  I left Bratislava over the Bridge of the National Slovak Uprising, better known as the UFO bridge, whose main suspension pylon is topped with a giant saucer-shaped viewing gallery, 85 metres up. This UFO Tower has become the unofficial emblem of the city, and locals joke that the only way to avoid seeing it is to climb up it, but secretly there’s still some pride in its construction, which is internationally admired not for its aesthetics, but for its engineering. To my eye it looked less like a UFO and more like a giant jockey desperately hanging on to the reins of a tearaway bridge, bolting from the gruesome architecture creeping up on it from the southern shore.

  Fortunately the cycle route skirted all that ugliness, sticking instead to the ridge of the embankments which braided the river’s edge, and after fifteen minutes I found I’d snuck out of Bratislava the back way. I was back in countryside again, but this was an unreal countryside that was largely man-made, part of a giant communist-era project that had swallowed up more of the natural Danube marshland and riverbank and had caused considerable friction with neighbouring Hungary.

  Slovakia’s Gabikovo dam had originally been planned as one of a pair, with the other to be at Nagymaros in Hungary, and between them they would have produced copious quantities of hydropower, to the glory of the communist ideal. But the Hungarians dragged their feet. Being more aware of ecological issues, and living in a more liberal state at that time (the 1980s) than the Slovaks, the people objected more vociferously to the Soviet-led project, particularly because the Nagymaros dam would be located on the Danube Bend, one of Hungary’s traditional tourism destinations. So while the Slovaks embarked on their end of the operation like good boys, the Hungarian works faltered, and then stopped altogether with the fall of the Wall. By that time the Slovaks had gone too far to be able to stop, so they completed Gabcikovo, and in so doing massively altered the dimensions and ecology of the river where it entered Hungary, creating a point of contention between the two countries that, along with the minority Hungarian issue, still sours relations today.

  Viewed from the bicycle saddle, the landscape surrounding the new reservoir certainly had a feeling of unreality to it: a golf course without any little white balls. On the shore, it was smoothed and shaped, carpeted in grassland, stitched with drainage ditches and banded with tarmac that would be busy with roller-bladers at the weekend. Out on the water there were clumps of surviving grassland and the wreckage of flooded forest with corpses of trees keeled over on their sides, like an elephant’s graveyard that had filled with water, water that slopped and wallowed, directionless and disorientated, not yet decided whether it was a river or a lake.

  And as for the border between the two awkward neighbours, it wasn’t easy to find either. When it got close, the cyclepath veered nervously away from Hungarian territory back into Slovakia, without so much as a sign, so I had to burrow inland on country roads to find an arterial road with a bored border guard who clambered out of his cabin to look at my passport. There was no question of any ‘Welcome to Hungary’.

  Two days later I was back on the border again, this time in a light-green cantilevered no-man’s-land suspended between the two countries, right above the turbulent centre of the Danube. To my right the basilica of Esztergom rose domineeringly above the water from the first riverside hill since Bratislava, while to my left stood yet another set of incongruous Slovakian apartment blocks, making an unnecessarily urban statement in what was essentially just countryside. Beneath me the revitalized river sashayed onwards, wiggling with pleasure at the prospect of leaving the boring plain and eager to throw itself through the chicanes of the Danube Bend.

  I was standing at the mid-point of Esztergom’s Maria Valeria bridge, old in design but new in execution. There had long been a bridge here, but it had been blown up by the Germans as they retreated at the end of the Second World War, and for the next sixty years the wreckage had remained, a forlorn pair of twisted stubs. Neither Hungary nor Slovakia would pay for it to be replaced. The recent rebuild, using the old design, was meant to epitomize the improving relationship between the two countries, but it was done at the EU’s expense, with the Union acting as marriage-broker after neither nation would take the initiative on its own. Whether the reconstruction had helped repair cross-border relations was difficult to judge, because now, rather than gazing longingly across the river at their spiritual home, the population of ‘Upper Hungary’ – i.e. western Slovakia – could nip across for a bit of cultural reinforcement, potentially widening the cultural gap between themselves and the majority Slovaks back home.

  Nor are the Hungarian Slovaks the only satellite community still looking across to the mother ship; there are hundreds of thousands of ethnic Hungarians in Romania, Serbia and to a lesser extent Croatia, trapped in the mesh of imposed border changes. Today’s Hungary is a pale shadow of its former glorious self, having lost two-thirds of its body-mass after choosing the wrong side in the First World War. Over 100,000 square kilometres of Hungarian flesh – more than was left on the Hungarian bone – was sliced off and thrown to its hungry neighbours. Thus Upper Hungary became part of Slovakia, but most of that lost land was away to the east, in a place called Transylvania, which was handed wholesale to an emerging nation called Romania.

  As a result Hungary, which had formerly been an equal partner in the sprawling Habsburg Empire, was reduced by Trianon to a nugget of Magyars surrounded by a sea of Slavs. The treaty-signing was regarded as a tragic day in Hungarian history; shops were shut and black flags flown as the nation mourned its losses. Hungarians saw themselves as the big victims of modern Europe, and it was Hitler’s promise of giving most of this lost territory back which encouraged them to have a second go at war. Thus they joined, and lost, two world wars in a row, and they have been smarting from the consequences ever since.

  In normal circumstances the dismemberment of a nation like this would have been sufficient trigger for a seething discontent which would eventually have erupted into ethnic strife the likes of which later ignited the Balkans. But strongly repressive communism put a heavy lid on the boiling pot, halting any serious thoughts of rebellion within Hungary. Even so, nearly a century later, the restoration of Greater Hungary is still a voter issue in domestic Hungarian politics, particularly amongst older people. And while the young may not speak out on the subject, there is a general feeling throughout society that the nation has been on the wrong end of some very harsh decisions taken by the big bullies of Europe.

  That victim syndrome is reinforced by a national predilection for pessimism. Hungary has the highest suicide rate in Europe, and its celebrity self-killers include a couple of prime ministers (both of them from the Teleki dynasty) and a Miss Hungary, not long after her coronation. The nation’s heroes are poets and playwrights who generally die tragically, one of whom famously penned a song called ‘Gloomy Sunday’, which became known as the Hungarian Suicide Song and the lyrics of which supposedly hypnotized the vulnerable into taking their own lives.

  Sunday is gloomy, my hours are slumberless

  Dearest, the shadows I live with are numberless, etc., etc.

  Eventually the composer, Rezsö Seress, could stand his lyrics no longer and jumped to his own death.

  But I hadn’t come out to the middle of the Maria Valeria bridge to throw myself off; I had come because it was here that Patrick Leigh Fermor had stood, back in the very last years of the original river crossing. After a big diversion north to Prague he had returned to the river at this point, and here he had paused, dramatically, poised between two countries – and two books. He’d ended A Time of Gifts on the middle of the bridge, with a description of storks filing across the sky, before picking up his journey into Hungary in Between the Woods and the Water. So for me, standing out in the middle of that bridge was the literary equivalent of a reel change in the middle of an old-fashioned cinema film. Looking up, however, I could see no storks, only a Tesco’s plastic bag rising steadily on an upward draft of hot air, drifting out to mid-rive
r and then hitting a cooler airstream and plunging down, meeting the same fate as the Tailor of Ulm.

  Reading Leigh Fermor’s account of Esztergom was difficult for me. Where he had soared stork-like in an inspirational riff that covered several pages, I plunged down like that Tesco’s bag into a metaphysical bath of cold water. The middle of the Maria Valeria did nothing for me, so I plodded back to shore feeling leaden-footed and glum.

  In truth, I’d struggled with my first days in Hungary. Although it was one of the first countries to shake itself free of communism, it remains one of the least-understood, least-explored regions of Central Europe. For long centuries it had been buried under Turkish rule, swiftly followed by integration into the Austro-Hungarian imperial system, and the two of them had conspired to fossilize its social structure and exclude any whiff of the likes of the Renaissance, the Reformation or Humanism. As a result it is where Europe changes gear – cuisine, clothes, brands, attitudes and alphabets – and becomes … different.

  From the perspective of northern Europe, we haven’t yet learned how to appreciate the aesthetics of the nations beyond Vienna. We haven’t studied their history or their arts, and none of them were British colonial territory so they never come up at university. Their church architecture plops into the gap somewhere between onion-domed baroque and Byzantine, their languages don’t figure on most Western curricula and their people never really had the wealth to indulge themselves in design flourishes inside or outside their dwellings. Accordingly they’re not in the books; the artistic, cultural and touristic surveys of Europe have passed them by. And accordingly, while we can happily declare that the Dutch wear clogs, skate on frozen rivers and eat cheese, and that the Italians drive Vespas, argue a lot and eat spaghetti, we can’t make any such platitudinous generalizations about our fellow EU members in the East.

  When it comes to Hungary, we do have a semi-excuse, because the Hungarians are newcomers to Europe. Led by Attila the Hun, they poured into the vacuum left by the departing Romans in the fifth century ad. Originally a Finno-Ugric race, they supposedly came from the lands between the Volga and the Urals, and their closest European relatives are the Finns, who are almost as suicidal as them. The joke runs that when the original Finno-Ugric tribe first arrived in Europe they came across a signpost with two arrows; one pointed to Suomi (Finland) and the other had broken off. So those who could read went to Finland.

  The Hungarian language itself is linguistically distinct from the rest of Europe, and for a traveller like me, familiar with Latin-based or Germanic idiom, it proved as slippery as a bar of soap. No matter how much I repeated a word learned one day, I would find it had escaped me again the next, with the result that whereas previously I’d felt myself to be inside the European aquarium, happily swimming downriver with the rest, now I felt separated from everyone by a pane of glass. I could see people’s mouths moving in my direction, but what emerged was a river of liquid sounds, with no recognizable linguistic wreckage that I could cling to.

  It didn’t help that the cyclepath suddenly evaporated, depositing me in the hot slipstreams of lorries, where I had to hold on to my hat in the heat. Fellow long-distance cyclists had evaporated, too, and any cyclists I met were no longer lycra-clad, but farm workers carrying tools or elderly women in headscarves going very slowly to informal vegetable markets at the village crossroads. Their bicycles were not the shiny and whirring variety I’d been travelling with thus far, but rattling boneshakers with wrap-around handlebars and a basket at the front.

  Meanwhile the landscape beyond the road edge had lost the organized neatness of mechanized farming, letting anarchy creep in at the edges. In places the poppies were rampant, streaking the fields with scarlet stripes as if God had slashed the land with his fingernail and drawn blood, just to show that he could. The hedgerows were pungent with flowering wild fruit, marsh reed, alder berries and dying lilac, and cycling through it was as rich as walking down the perfume aisle of a department store. The air was hung with feathery seeds, held aloft by the rising heat from the tarmac, praying for a puff of wind that would bring them to ground.

  On my arrival in Hungary I’d crossed the flatlands of the Moroni Duna, a tributary of the Danube, home to tall purple spears of marsh orchids and more delicate, egg-shaped bee orchids. Thick bushes of marsh elder lined the paths, providing shade for marsh gentian, tiny specks of deep, deep blue. I knew there’d be March hares and black Siberian storks hereabouts, but all I saw was the occasional disruptive diggings of wild boar.

  For long stretches the Danube’s banks became practically inaccessible thanks to abandoned industrial installations surrounded by barbed-wire fencing. In these relics of a less happy era every window was smashed and the only sign of life was a couple of caretakers in dungarees picking away at a green scab of a vegetable patch in the midst of flaking pipes and rusting boilers.

  I’d stopped for a night in Györ, a sometime baroque town with a strong connection to Bavaria’s Ingolstadt, because this was where the engines for Audis were made. In contrast to the land around it, the city was flush with civic cash, recently pedestrianized, strung with flower baskets, and it was full of students, flirting and eating ice-cream. But that reinvigoration didn’t extend to the grand old hotel I found by the railway station, too large and unwieldy for new enterprise cash. It was being run into the ground like an obsolete old gas-guzzler. Bits were rusty and falling off, the plastic fittings had turned brittle with age, and whenever I went up to my room I was preceded by a cranky fly, which hovered in the corridor, waiting for me, like a persistent porter who hadn’t yet been given his tip. The showers in the communal bathroom had no shower heads and were lined up all in a row as at a rugby club, with no curtains, presumably on the basis that there was no need for modesty in a world where all men were created equal. Downstairs, the receptionist had been there since time immemorial, and had taken on the colour, and the immobility, of the hotel stone. Most of the time he was on a proscribed coffee or cigarette break in the back room, and guests had to wait until the stipulated time had elapsed before he would creak back into view to hand over a key. Too old and too set in his ways for a job in Györ’s new industries, the Audi plant or the Nokia factory, he was serving out his time in the only slice of Györ’s past that respected the old working practices, and there was nothing more annoying to him than guests.

  And so, a day later, I had finally arrived in Esztergom with mixed feelings about Hungary, looking to find inspiration in the city which had impressed Leigh Fermor.

  It was easy to see why the Romans had chosen to build a fortress here. Esztergom’s Castle Hill sits in a great strategic location on a corner carved out by the Danube and its tributary the Kis-Duna (small Danube). Whoever held the hill controlled the river and extended his authority over miles of surrounding plains. So it was a natural place for one of those Finno-Ugric princes who hadn’t turned right for Suomi to set up his court, back in the tenth century, elaborating on what the Romans had left behind. Here his son István, aka Stephen, had been born.

  Stephen is regarded as the father of modern Hungary, and Esztergom accordingly became the capital for the nation’s first 250 years. From the fortress, Stephen cajoled and bullied the other Magyar princes and landowners into coming together under one banner – his. He also drove out paganism and shamanism, forcing his subjects to accept Christianity, so it is as the mystical St Stephen rather than brutal King Stephen that he is remembered in the massive nineteenth-century basilica which has been raised on the top of Castle Hill.

  Modelled on St Peter’s in Rome, the basilica’s main feature is a round tower topped with a giant, light-green copper dome. It exudes power and solidity, and was built to impress by sheer size, if not by grace. From 5 kilometres away it had looked pleasingly like an elevated musical box – I could imagine lifting the lid for it to play a tune – but now, up close, it had no such frivolity. The massive walls were intimidating, not graceful. Inside, the huge domed space was bare and severe, fin
ished in grey shiny marble and dotted with Maltese crosses, and that immensity continued in the giant crypt below, as monumental as an Egyptian burial site, lined with the flamboyant tombs of former archbishops covered in sculpture. That afternoon it was practically empty, and its monumentalism left me cold.

  I found the city centre a disappointment, too. Esztergom is still the seat of Roman Catholicism in Hungary, but its importance is only written in stone, not in any evident vitality or spirituality. Traffic piled through the main street, but off to the sides the quiet bishops’ palaces, monasteries and libraries were deserted, and the tree-lined promenade along the prettily named Kis-Duna was spoiled by the pungent smell from the turgid green water that flowed between its banks. I sat down on one of the benches and thumbed through the first chapter of Between the Woods and the Water, seeking inspiration. But it didn’t help. Leigh Fermor kicks off the book with his usual whirlwind of imagery, meeting Esztergom’s mayor and attending an Easter celebration on Castle Hill, which he describes in a handful of heady, baroque pages. There was no mayoral meeting or pageantry for me, so, beginning to appreciate the Hungarian expression ‘under a frog’s arse down a coal mine’ (i.e. at the lowest of the low), I bought a few beers and retreated to my pension, where I watched Liverpool lose the final of the Champion’s League on TV.

  It wasn’t a good moment in the journey, that day in Esztergom, and that’s not because I am a Liverpool fan. I was struggling with Hungary, with the change from compatible Western culture to the more challenging East. I was also struggling with loneliness, and it was at Esztergom that loneliness finally got the upper hand.