The Danube

by Nick Thorpe

  Sorin is very proud of his grandfather. ‘He was one of twelve brothers, and he went out to fish at the age of nine, to help feed the family – they lived only from fishing.’ Even now, he says, there are people who come up to Sorin in the street, and tell him how his grandfather saved them when their boats capsized. His family were Don Cossacks, offered land by Catherine the Great in the Crimea. But the Crimean Tatars pushed them southwards, all the way to the Danube. Sorin used to go to Izmail by boat in the 1990s, to bring food and alcohol back to sell in Romania. ‘Everything was so cheap there – you could buy a whole head of cheese, big as a wheel, for almost nothing!’ He now makes a living from the tourist trade in summer, and from fishing. The winds in the delta each have a name. The south wind is called the moriana, and fishermen say that when it blows you just have to put your nets in the water and they fill with fish. The north wind, the crivǎțs, comes from Russia, and brings us nothing, he says. It is so strong it makes currents in the water, and breaks nets thicker than his thumb. He holds it up, for dramatic effect, still covered in the entrails of the fish he is gutting for our supper. ‘But the wind is fickle, it can turn around from one moment to the next, and blow a squall from the other direction.’ I remember the British graves in Sulina and all the deaths from collisions and drownings. His fried carp are tasty and plentiful, but full of bones. They might have been better suited to Maria Avramov's fish balls. The level in the two-litre plastic bottle of wine he picked up from a ramshackle bar with the money I gave him plunges downwards dangerously. We part company after supper, and he says he will pick me up in an hour from my hotel for our fishing trip. The hours pass, and by the time he arrives roaring drunk after midnight I have gone off the plan altogether.

  The next morning, to make sure that no feelings are hurt on either side, and to lessen the danger that I will ask for the money back, he takes me by boat to the fish-collecting centre. There is a floating platform with a metal shed at the back, where fish are stacked to the ceiling in plastic crates. The man in charge is busy on his mobile phone. At first he is suspicious of me. This is nowhere near the tourist season and my story about writing a book about the Danube sounds far-fetched. Reluctantly, he answers my questions. The herring come in from the sea when the Danube reaches 6 or 7 degrees centigrade. The migration takes place every five years. They take forty-five days to swim upriver, as far as the Iron Gates dam that blocks their way. There they spawn, before swimming back to the sea, which takes only fifteen days downstream. He pays five to six lei per kilo for the fish (under two dollars) and sells them wholesale to the shops. The fish will go for four times that price in the markets of Constanța and Bucharest.

  I decline a lift back to town with Sorin, and set out on foot down a street of neat peasant houses, wood panelled, painted pastel shades of blue and green. Black rowing boats that will never again go to sea are beached in back gardens and yards, keel up, elegant as musical instruments in their final resting places. Hens roost in some, children play in others.

  Ilie Sidurenko and his wife are in their front garden, pruning the vines. ‘So you're going upriver, like the sturgeon!’ he remarks with delight, when I tell him about my journey. ‘The sturgeon is a smart fish, if he smells nets, you can't catch him … The best time is when the bed of the river or the sea is muddy, and he gets confused. We used to lay hooks, three, five, seven kilometres out to sea. Only the older fishermen knew the secret, and now it is not passed on, it will be lost.’ He hardly interrupts his work, methodically tying his vines as we speak. The biggest sturgeon he ever caught was a male, 400 kilos, ‘not a long fish, but a fat one!’ Then in December 2004, just before Christmas, he was alone on the Danube – a rare event, as the fishermen always fish in pairs. He landed a female, 209 kilos, with 35 kilos of caviar. ‘I sold it to the fish-collecting centre in the village,’ says Ilie, showing no emotion. ‘I don't care what they did with it.’

  CHAPTER 3

  Mountains of the Fathers

  We came to the town known by the name of Baba Saltuq. They relate that this Saltuq was an ecstatic devotee (dervish), although things are told of him which are reproved by the Divine Law. This is the last of the towns possessed by the Turks, and between it and the territory of the Greeks is a journey of eighteen days through an uninhabited waste, for eight days of which there is no water.

  IBN BATTUTA, FOURTEENTH-CENTURY TRAVELLER1

  SOUTH OF Tulcea on the road to Constanța is the town of Babadag. There are woods, unusual for the bare, rolling landscape of Dobrogea, fresh water springs, a hotel and restaurant with a rather Turkish feel, and the oldest mosque in Romania. The Polish writer Andrzej Stasiuk got here before I did, and wrote a book called The Road to Babadag,2 but his book is about his journey there, not his arrival.

  In my suitcase I carry an old, red hardback copy of The Travels of Ibn Battuta, an Islamic traveller of the fourteenth century. He reached Babadag in 1332 and used his time to re-provision his caravan for the long journey south to Constantinople, still in the ‘territory of the Greeks’, before the Ottoman conquest of 1453. ‘A provision of water is laid in for this stage, and carried in large and small skins on the wagons. Since our entry into it was in the cold weather, we have no need of much water, and the Turks carry milk in large skins, mix it with cooked dugi and drink that so that they feel no thirst. At this city we made our preparations for the crossing of the wasteland.’

  Babadag means ‘the mountain of the father’ in Turkish. Just a few kilometres inland from the Black Sea, its relationship to the Danube is hard to define. As a centre of miracles and a place of pilgrimage for devout Muslims, the small wooded hill towers over the surrounding landscape, guarding the southern approaches to the river. Nearby, the US military share a training ground with the Romanian army, to practise manoeuvres for the next wars in the Islamic heartlands as though hoping to tap some of its magic. Videos posted on the internet show spidermen in combat fatigues, weighed down with a paraphernalia of gadgets and weaponry, leaping from helicopters and taking cover behind tanks. The ‘father’ in the name is Sari Saltuq, who arrived here with forty warriors by flying carpet from Central Anatolia, according to one source, to convert Dobrogea to Islam. Many wonders are told about him, not least that he saved the daughter of the King of Dobrogea from a dragon and cut off its seven heads with his wooden Bektashi sword.3 A peculiar variant of the story suggests that a Christian monk claimed credit for this feat, in order to win the hand in marriage of the King's daughter – the prize announced by her father for anyone who could rid him of the dragon. Sari Saltuq proposed to the monk an ordeal by fire, to find out which of them was telling the truth about the defeat of the dragon. They were both boiled alive in the same cauldron, suspended over the flames. The monk perished in agony, while Sari Saltuq emerged unscathed. In other legends he is paired with Saint Nicholas, the patron saint of children.

  At Blagaj in Bosnia, where the River Buna – ‘the good’ – flows fully formed out of a cliff face, a handsome dervish lodge clings to the cliff ledge beside it. Ancient stone steps lead down straight into the crystal clear water, where the dervishes used to come to wash before prayers. Up in the lodge the rooms hum with silence and devotion. Off one room is a domed stone roof, with star-shaped holes cut into it through which the rain can fall: an Islamic shower room. In a small shrine at the side of the building is one of the tombs of Sari Saltuq, royally clad in green and gold, with his rounded dervish hat at the raised end. During the 1992–95 war, Muslim refugees took shelter here, and the Croats who shelled Blagaj tried and failed to drop mortars on the roof. Each night Zijo, the self-appointed caretaker of the place, would put cups of water out beside the raised coffins. Each morning he would find the cups empty.4 There is another, sadder story told about Blagaj. Close to where the Buna emerges from the cliff are two restaurants, famous for their excellent trout, freshly caught from the river. The cliff above was once home to eagles. Just before the war, in the winter of 1991, the restaurant owner believed the eagles we
re stealing his hens, and put out the poisoned carcass of a sheep for them to eat. The eagles died. According to local legend, war would engulf Bosnia if the eagles ever disappear from Blagaj. The conflict began the following April. Another tomb of Sari Saltuq, at Krujë in Albania, resides high in the mountains looking down on to the Adriatic. Another small domed turbe, arched with thin, wafer-like bricks. Another fine, slanted coffin, dressed in green and gold cloth, mounted with a dervish mitre. Outside you can rest in the shade of tall mulberry trees and enjoy the sweet scent of fig trees baking in hot sunshine. Vines, honeysuckle and pomegranates grow from the cracks in the walls.5

  Thin, tentative threads tie distant Albania and Bosnia to the Danube. The Drina river turns its back on the White and Black Drin rivers and the Neretva, which all flow westwards to the Adriatic. The Drina flows north and east into the Morava, which meets the Danube before Belgrade. Sari Saltuq has seven tombs in all and is said to have been buried in each of them, so no one knows where his body really lies. ‘Through tolerance and piety … Sari Saltuq influenced the non-Muslims and contributed a great deal to the spreading of the Islamic religion in the Balkans. He won the non-Muslims’ affection, maintaining open lines of communication with them, and thus for centuries Muslims and non-Muslims have been living in peace and harmony in Dobrogea,’ reads the information booklet, available at the mosque. The mosque itself has another tomb, just behind the main building, of Gazi Ali Pasha, who was the governor of Buda in the early seventeenth century.

  The snowdrops of Babadag, Memnune tells me sternly, have the most beautiful scent. ‘But what do they actually smell of?’ I ask her, casting aside a lifetime of certainty that while snowdrops may have many other qualities, they are certainly odourless. ‘Freshly laundered linen on a winter's day,’ she says, confidently.

  Memnune serves cups of strong black Turkish coffee as we sit in her neat, middle-class living room discussing Sari Saltuq. I asked in the street of the town who could tell me about the saint and was directed straight here. She is a matronly woman, with intelligent brown eyes and a passion for flowers and history. Sari Saltuq's grave disappeared for a while, she tells me, only to be rediscovered by a man called Koyun Baba, while walking with his sheep. Koyun means ‘sheep’ in Turkish. Babadag was once threatened by a huge flood, pouring from a hole in the ground, but Koyun Baba saved the community by pushing barrow-loads of cotton into the hole. The British orientalist F. W. Hasluck mentions another Bektashi saint, Pambuk Baba, ‘who seems to have succeeded, or to be identical with the Bektashi saint Koyun Baba’.6 Pambuk means ‘cotton’ in Turkish. Both men were disciples, like Sari Saltuq, of Hajji Bektash, the founder of the Bektashi order of dervishes, the mystical order most closely associated with the janissaries, the elite of the Ottoman armies. There are still Bektashi strongholds in Albania and Macedonia. Miskin Baba, from the island of Ada Kaleh in the Danube, and Gül Baba, still honoured upstream in Budapest, were also Bektashis. The Danube carried the Islamic faith upriver into Europe. The track up the mountain is steep and well worn, through young woods of oak and acacia, sprouting out of a carpet of bluebells. As the path levels at the top of the hill, the bushes are tied with strips of coloured rags, like man-made blossom impatient for spring. Koyun Baba's grave is rather humble, with a crescent moon at its head, set in crude granite. He didn't actually want a grave at all – unlike Sari Saltuq – and each time the villagers made one for him, the story goes, he scattered the rocks, which came to resemble sheep on the meadows around the mountain. On his latest grave, not yet self-vandalised, stands a single candle. The rags on the bushes were tied by Muslim Gypsies, Memnune told me, who make pilgrimages and picnics here every year on 6 May, Saint George's Day according to the Gregorian calendar. A single robin hops curiously from branch to branch, watching me closely. A battered tin sign admonishes visitors, in Romanian and Turkish, that it is a sin to ask for anything from the dead, a warning defied by every strip of rag tied to the branches. From far below this pudding-shaped hill come the barking of dogs and the shouts of men engaged in some sporting activity. Rain starts to fall lightly on Koyun Baba's grave. Before leaving, I pick a small handful of snowdrops. Delicate, but fully scented, just like fresh linen sheets, plucked, stiff to the touch, from a washing line on a cold winter's day.

  When we meet again Memnune is so pleased to hear that I have taken the trouble to visit Koyun Baba, she tells me her dream. Some years earlier, on the night before the Muslim feast of Bayram, she dreamt that she should sacrifice a white ram on the right side of the courtyard of the mosque in Babadag. Muslims do sacrifice rams during Bayram, but this would normally be done in one's own yard. The strangest feature of her dream was that the gardens and yard of the mosque were laid out in a different pattern to how they really were at the time. She obeyed the dream and, with her brother-in-law's help, found an animal and sacrificed it in the place she had been told. Some time later, with funds from Turkey, the land around the mosque was re-landscaped and now corresponds exactly to the way she saw it in her dream. Across eastern Europe, the former empires quietly nurse what is left of their heritage, the Turks their mosques, the Russians their war memorials.

  Memnune calls a friend to take me to Sari Saltuq's tomb. It is a simple, handsome affair, with the traditional green-draped coffin in the centre of the room and an arched, beehive-shaped roof made of thin, white-washed bricks. The brickwork is like the roof of the Bajrakli mosque in Belgrade. The floor is paved with stone. Memnune used to come here as a child with her grandmother every Friday to light candles, ‘to honour the heroes’, she explains. And to make wishes, one with each candle. They always lit white candles, she stresses, not the thin, yellow beeswax ones favoured by the Orthodox Christians. Opposite Sari Saltuq's tomb is a spring famous for the healing qualities of its waters. A young Gypsy girl, perhaps fourteen years old with a cigarette dangling from her lips, arrives with her younger brother on a horse and cart. They smile sweetly at us, then wrestle a big blue plastic container down off the cart and start filling it. There is no running water in most houses in the Roma district.

  In his front room on a low hill on the far side of the town, Recep Lupu, the unofficial head of Babadag's Roma community, talks about the pride and the shame of his people. ‘We don't have a language of our own, it's more like a dialect,’ he says, sitting with his wife and mother-in-law in their living room, just off the steep, unmade road that is the Gypsy high street. On the wall hangs a huge carpet depicting the ‘Abduction of the Seraj’. His wife sits cross-legged on the bed, mythically beautiful in the traditional, bright long skirts and headscarf of her people. Her mother sits beside her, a picture of stern, silent dignity. ‘We speak a mixture of words …’ Recep continues, ‘Bulgarian, Russian, Romanian, Gypsy and Turkish – it changes all the time – we shift between them. We are too ashamed to speak our own language.’

  Unlike most of the Roma in Babadag, Recep and his family are Pentecostalists. He has a very earthly explanation for giving up Islam. ‘If you are a Muslim, you have to marry a fellow Muslim. In the Pentecostalist church, you can marry who you wish!’ I look over at his wife, who smiles, shyly. ‘All her family are Christians too …’ The evangelical Protestants arrived in the Dobrogea region at the end of the twentieth century, and have launched an aggressive recruitment drive among the Muslim Gypsies to ‘save their souls’. The community has a parallel justice system, accepted by the Romanian state in disputes where only Roma are involved. Instead of punishment or retribution for crimes, the emphasis is on respect, honour and repairing the torn fabric of the community. The council of elders sits to hear all sides in the dispute, then issues a verdict designed to satisfy the injured party. The offender must pay compensation, or find other ways to make up for the harm generated by his act.

  Recep and his wife have only two children. That is unusual. ‘Most have five or six, occasionally ten or eleven. For myself, two is enough … but if God wants us to have one more …’ He exchanges another gentle smile with his wife. His y
oungest son accepts the gift of my pencil and sits down to draw.

  ‘The biggest problem here is poverty and the lack of education,’ his wife explains. ‘The boys just go to school to get a driving licence.’ You have to have finished eight grades of school in Romania to apply for a licence. ‘The girls finish four grades or even less. They have to stay at home to take care of the little ones because their parents go to work in other villages. The children get married very young. It used to be at eleven or twelve, now more often at fourteen or fifteen.’ Their main work is trade. ‘We buy clothes, cutlery, dishes, or animals in the wholesale market, then take them from village to village, to sell.’ Few Roma, if any, own land.