by Nick Thorpe
Only for a brief period, from 1740 to 1790, did the Swabians of Ulm board their Kuppe – simple wooden boats with long rudders, powered by oars – and head downriver to resettle lands in Hungary laid waste by war and disease. And even they would probably have stayed at home had it not been for the persuasive charm of the Habsburg empress Maria Theresa.
With all due respect to the noble efforts of past writers, I feel I can offer something different. After half a lifetime living in eastern Europe, it seems high time for a journey westwards, upriver, to cast new light on the continent as people coming from the east see it, rising early in the morning, following their own shadows. One man, at least, understood my journey. Ilie Sidurenko, a retired fisherman in the village of Sfântu Gheorghe, on the southernmost tip of the Danube, roared with approval when I told him my plan. ‘You will be like the sturgeon!’ he laughed. Heading upriver to spawn.
As I travelled, I became aware of the Danube's contribution to Europe, in the sense that it carved a path, or laid a trail, for people to follow westwards. Europe was populated and ‘civilised’ from the east. Around 6200 BC, farmers from Anatolia settled in south-eastern Europe, bringing with them cows and sheep, goats and seeds. Analysis of the genetic structure of milk traces found on shards of Neolithic pottery shows that their cows mated with aurochs, the wild bulls of the European continent.5 The settlers brought with them a knowledge of metallurgy. They built kilns that reached a temperature of 1,100 degrees Celsius to smelt copper from the greenish-brown rocks of the northern Balkans at Rudna Glava in Serbia and Ai Bunar in Bulgaria. From this new material of such dazzling beauty they fashioned exquisite jewellery, tools and weapons.6 These were traded far and wide, and the longer the river, the greater the reach. Not much later, gold was extracted from rich seams, or washed from the tributaries of the Danube.
Between 5000 and 3500 BC, large villages or towns grew up across south-eastern Europe, especially between the Danube and Dnieper rivers. The largest, at Majdanetskoe and Tal'janki, boasted 2,700 households and around 10,000 inhabitants, five hundred years before the foundation of the Sumerian city states between the Tigris and the Euphrates.7 This was at a time when most other inhabitants of mainland Europe were clustered in small clans, chewing on bones in dank caves. Such towns or large villages grew physically higher from the surrounding countryside into tells or raised cities, as successive generations built on the ruins beneath them. This cluster of independent cultures, known to archaeologists as Tripol'ye-Cucuteni, Hamangia, Gumelnița, Karanovo and Vinča, established the European continent's first long-distance trade in beautiful pinkish-white spiny oyster shells, Spondylus gaederopus.8 The translucent shells did not just reflect the light; they seemed to carry it within themselves, catching and storing the moonlight across the Aegean Sea where they were gathered. This was in vivid contrast to the dark, graceful pots with intricate lines, the animal-headed lids and handles of the same cultures. The Spondylus shells were buried with their owners, both male and female, as sacred objects to smooth the difficult journey to the next world. Salt was as important to the peoples of the region as the ornaments and tools they used. The white gold quarried from the mines near Tuzla in Bosnia, Varna in Bulgaria, Turda in Transylvania and Hallstatt in Austria enabled them to preserve and trade over vast distances the meat and fish they hunted.9
These civilisations were named ‘Old Europe’ by the American-Lithuanian archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, and the name still seems more appropriate than the ‘New Europe’ label attached to eastern Europe by American statesmen and British comedians. Many thousands of miniature clay figurines, mostly female, with lines and spirals drawn on their bodies, have been found throughout the Lower and Middle Danube region. Marija Gimbutas has argued that these represent proof of the spiritual and social power of women, and named the groups ‘councils of the goddess’, evidence of a matriarchal society.10 More recently, archaeologists have argued that they were mere playthings, household objects which tell us more about their owners’ fashion-sense than their beliefs.11
There is more controversy over the markings on the beautiful pottery of the same civilisations. Some researchers claim that these represent a ‘Danube script’, even earlier than the Sumerian and still undeciphered.12 The marks found on pottery in graves are rather different from those found in households, suggesting a distinction between the information which might be useful in this life and the next. The civilisation of this Copper Age beside the Danube was shattered by the invasion of Bronze Age peoples, carrying more robust weapons, riding newly domesticated horses, but with less knowledge of working the land. Although the quality of the pottery declined, that of sharp metal and its uses improved. One school of thought suggests a sharp break at this point, between a matriarchal, peace-loving world, and a patriarchal, war-loving one.
Greek colonies were founded, crumbled, then re-fortified by Roman ones – a rare example in the region of civilisation arriving from the West. Christianity put a spear in the hand of the Thracian horseman, a dragon beneath his hooves, and renamed him Saint George. The Romans built roads, and imposed some order on the landscape, then fell to the ‘barbarians’ in their own ranks. The Scythians and Sarmatians, Alans, Huns and Slavs rode their horses down the same route as Bronze Age invaders, from the steppes north of the Black Sea, down the narrow strip of land between the elbow of the Carpathians and the sea, then turned west when they hit the Danube.
The Ottoman Turks brought another wave of civilisation from the East and rebuilt thermal baths neglected since Roman times. Their tolerance of Christianity and Judaism encouraged orthodox Russians to take refuge from the persecution of the Tsars, and gave shelter to Jews fleeing from the cruelties of the Spanish kings. Little clay oil-lamps found at the large military camp of Viminacium near Belgrade reveal the Roman passion for candle-lit bathing before they set out eastwards along the Danube to fight the Dacians.13
The surviving thermal baths of Buda, with their magnificent chambers and copper roofs, are proof of a similar passion for cleanliness among the Turks. In the Middle Ages, the Roma arrived from the East in Europe and dazzled audiences with their skills in metal-working, music, and in taming animals. Their westward journey continues, despite the efforts of successive French governments to send them ‘home’.
This book has several wellsprings. In February 1995 I found myself high over Africa, flying home to Budapest from Nairobi in Kenya on a crystal-clear winter's morning. The plane followed the White Nile, nine thousand metres below, like a migrating bird. For hour after hour I watched the blue line in the sand, sometimes thicker, sometimes thinner, bulging to accommodate islands and marshes, turning from silver to blue then back to silver. I saw the Blue Nile attach its waters to the White, watched it split Cairo like an axe, then fan out into the great lake of the Mediterranean. We crossed Cyprus, semi-detached, floating cloud-like above the sea, Anatolia, then the corner of the Black Sea pond. Soon the Nile seemed to begin again, this time a blue line winding across green plains, knifing between mountains still white with snow. The thought struck me that the Nile and the Danube are just one river. The Danube as the Upper Nile, and the Nile as the Lower Danube. And just as the Victorian explorers Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke set out to find the sources of the Nile, why not try to rediscover the sources of the Danube? Egypt was the ‘gift of the Nile’ wrote Herodotus.14 Might not Europe be the ‘gift of the Danube’?
Another reason for travelling up the river is political. During the many years I have lived in Budapest, within a stone's throw of the Danube, I have witnessed the dismantling of the ugliest eyesore that marred the mental and physical horizon of the European continent: the mass of concrete and steel, of look-out towers and fortifications, known as the Iron Curtain. When I first came to live in eastern Europe, I encountered people who had never seen a Dutch tulip, or the perfect blue waters of the Adriatic, only a few hours drive away. I have met people to the west of the Curtain, who could not tell, and still cannot tell, the difference bet
ween Budapest and Bucharest, Slovenia and Slovakia.15
As an observer of the reunification of a Europe through which the Danube flows, I have witnessed the arrogance of the West towards the East. For me, the revolutions of 1989 were a triumph of the human spirit, a celebration of the need for freedom in all its forms, including, but not limited to, the economic. I saw no ‘triumph of capitalism’ or ‘Cold War victory’. The tearing down of the Iron Curtain was inspired by the desire to think, write, travel, work and play without the cold breath of an authoritarian state on your neck, listening to your phone, opening your letters or blackmailing your friends.
By travelling the Danube from East to West, my intention is to represent the lives and views of the people who live from, and beside, the river. I do not intend to romanticise the East. There are deep economic and structural problems, largely solved in the more fortunate west of the continent. Above all, there is a problem of story-telling. Large chunks of the recent past remain undigested. The terrible story of the Holocaust of eastern European Jews has been told, and told well.16 But other tragedies have been less well documented, and, where told, rarely translated. There are the Roma, robbed of their music and their mobility by the communists, in exchange for a mattress in a workers’ hostel and a factory job, then robbed of their livelihoods by the onset of capitalism. There are also the dwindling peasantry of eastern Europe, who won back their lands in the 1990s, only to lose them to land speculators in the 2000s or simply to weeds when their own children and grandchildren refused to get their hands dirty. And there are the children of Romania and Bulgaria who were left behind when their parents disappeared to Spain and Italy in search of work. The Danube flows through a region of multiple identities, but the river alone, constantly changing, is one.
I set out from the Danube delta in Romania in March 2011 and reached the sources of the Danube in Germany in March 2012, travelling in several stages. Between trips, I returned to Budapest, to make a living as a reporter and to spend time with my family. I travelled mostly by car, but also on foot, by bicycle, boat, train, plane and, just once, along the footpath at Kladovo in Serbia, on my son Matthew's skateboard.17 I swam in the river at every opportunity, usually in the early mornings of summer, in lazy lakes upstream of dams, or barely making progress against a current flowing at a muscular six kilometres per hour.
The backbone of this book is a new journey up the Danube, but I have also occasionally woven other journeys into the narrative. In the mid-1980s, I risked expulsion from Hungary to report on the protests against the Gabčíkovo-Nagymaros hydroelectric project on the Danube, between Hungary and Czechoslovakia. My secret police file in Hungary has detailed reports of conversations on those marches. ‘The so-called journalist makes little secret of his sympathy for the protesters,’ reads one of my favourite entries, compiled by an informer standing beside me at the ferry crossing in Esztergom. On April Fool's Day 1986 I was walking with friends through the Danube wetlands in Szigetköz in western Hungary when it started to rain. We did not realise that the gentle rains contained the first radiation from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster one thousand kilometres further east. In 1991 Hungary withdrew unilaterally from the hydroelectric scheme, but the Slovaks pressed ahead with a project which they saw as a matter of national pride, regardless of the environmental damage it would cause. In October 1992 four-fifths of the river along a thirty-kilometre section were diverted into a canal. The old bed of the Danube dried out in a matter of hours, and fishermen waded ankle deep in the marshlands that remained, trying to rescue the same fish they used to try to catch. People on both sides of the river are still counting the cost.
In March 1999 I watched from the Hyatt Hotel in New Belgrade as NATO missiles rained down on Batajnica, the Yugoslav military airfield to the north, and Pančevo, an oil refinery right on the Danube.
In 2000 I filmed pelicans in the Danube delta, in their largest remaining natural habitat in Europe. In 2005 I returned to the delta with a less pleasant task – to document the impact of bird-flu on rural communities which depend as much on their hens and geese as on fish for their livelihoods.
In late March 2010, the first traces of radioactive iodine from the nuclear disaster at Fukushima in Japan, ten thousand kilometres away, were found in the milk of sheep grazing near the Danube in Romania.18
In conversation with people on and by the river, I have also sought to write about their dreams and songs, their visions and nightmares. In his prison camp at Belene, an island on the river in Bulgaria, Todor Tsanev watched the mosquitoes eat his body and the bed bugs suck his blood for ten long years. In Orşova, near the Iron Gates dam, Ahmed Engur, a former inhabitant of the island of Ada Kaleh, still dreams that he is walking through the streets of the old Turkish town, before the buildings were dynamited and the floodwaters drowned it. For one man to dream of his old home would not be so surprising, but others tell the same story. From his dream, a new history of the past fifty years is spun. Perhaps, in a world not so dissimilar to our own, the Iron Gates hydroelectric project never happened. Perhaps the dam and turbines were never built at Gabčíkovo. Perhaps Ferenc Zsemlovics still pans for gold in the Danube at Zlatná na Ostrove, and did not have to become an ostrich farmer after all.
Colin Thubron wrote that the traveller's voice is ‘the sound of one civilisation reporting on another’. I hope my own voice will have a stereo effect. I stake my claim both as a traveller from the West rediscovering the East, and as a traveller from the East, rediscovering the West. I thought I knew the river, more or less, before I set out, but was often astonished, delighted, and only occasionally disappointed. There is more archaeology in this book than I expected, more traces of the Romans and their predecessors, more food and wine, and even more remarkable characters than I dared hope for.
These are the stories of the people of the Danube, and their dark, dreamy river.
1. The Danube delta, Dobrogea, and the Lower Danube in Romania and Bulgaria.
CHAPTER 1
The Beginning of the World
According to the Thracian account the country beyond the Danube is infested by bees, which makes further progress impossible; to my mind, however, this is an improbable story, as bees are not creatures which can stand the cold …
HERODOTUS1
‘The Danube snail (theodoxus danubialis) is recognized by its shell with transversal dark zig-zag stripes on lighter, usually yellowish ground. In the east it may also be plain black … [it] prefers clean streaming water rich in oxygen and with stony ground. Where such waters are dammed, the populations usually disappear.’2
THE STURGEON, Radu Suciu tells me, is an armoured fish. Images of long-nosed whiskery crusaders, underwater knights in full armour battling up the bed of the muddy Danube, wild-eyed through their visors, propelled by iron flippers, crowd my mind. What he means is that it doesn't have skin and a long, thin backbone, like most other fish; this is a fish which is all cartilage, a bundle of muscles, a masterpiece of design.
We are sitting in Radu's office at the Danube Delta Research Centre in Tulcea, the main delta town in Romania, surrounded by jars of pickled fish, mountains of papers, computer screens and shelves bursting with books. He hands me a Romanian translation of the Hungarian author Mór Jókai's Golden Man,3 which tells of the lost island of Ada Kaleh, far up the Danube near the Iron Gates. Those who fall in love with the Danube do so with the whole river, with her entire body, even those parts they have never seen.
On the walls outside his office, curved, wicked-looking hooks are fixed to the wall like clothes hooks, those once used by fishermen to catch sturgeon. This is not a fish to nibble nervously at bait on the end of anglers’ lines. This is a fish that can live for a hundred years, can grow to several hundred kilos, and can store a man's weight of caviar in its belly.
There are five kinds of sturgeon in the Danube: the beluga, the ship's sturgeon, the Russian sturgeon, the stellate and the sterlet. The ship's sturgeon, with its curved snout and rounded whiskers is
the closest to extinction, but none are exactly flourishing in the wild. This is the oldest fish on earth, once the pride of the river, and the most abundant. Ancient Dacian tribesmen caught them in a fence made up of stakes driven into the bed of the river, with hooks protruding between the wooden bars. The Dacian word for this device, garda, can still be found in modern Serbian. When the Romans conquered the Dacians, in two bloody campaigns from AD 100 to 113, they forced their captives to teach them how to catch sturgeon before they killed them or marched them off to the slave markets. The base of Trajan's Column in Rome shows bearded, trousered men cowering beneath the swords of triumphant legionaries, distinguished by their clean-shaven faces and short tunics. As a piece of war propaganda rather than faithful reportage, there are no images of bearded men teaching the Romans to fish.
Roman engineers adapted the Dacian model into a lobster pot, fixed to the riverbed. The technology has changed little. In the museum at Baja in Hungary, I saw wooden bars arranged like the side of a child's cot, with hooks protruding between them. The hooks get stuck in the fishes’ armour, and the more they struggle, the deeper the barbs embed themselves in their sides. These ‘fish fences’ are then hauled up beside the boats, and the fish extracted.
Radu rattles his visitor's box, a simple shoebox full of fish bones and fish skeletons. The sturgeon, he explains, ‘is a great climber and a poor swimmer’. He demonstrates with his arms the way the fish fixes its dorsal fins firmly at its side, and digs them into the riverbed as anchors on its long migrations up the River Danube. He produces two fins from his box, long and yellow and sharp, more like knitting needles than pins. When the fish reached the cataracts which once lined certain sections of the riverbed, they would anchor their bodies with these fins, swim a bit, then anchor again to rest behind a suitable rock. In that way they could climb the steep, swift-flowing uphill gradient.
