The Danube

by Nick Thorpe

  Father Atal first visited the monastery by chance, with no intention of becoming a monk. ‘It was February 2002. I had already done my military service, and was studying engineering at university in Bucharest. I don't know what happened to me. I just knew I had to come here.’ So he sold all his books, spent two weeks tying up all the loose strands of his life, and moved to Dervent. ‘I like the autumn the most, the range of colours, from raw green to dark brown. I also like the sunlight in summer, in August, when it casts a special colour … which foresees the fall.’ The hardest time, he says, is between January and mid-March when no visitors come at all. If he closes his eyes, I ask, what colour does he see the Danube? Blue he says, to my surprise. On my own travels, I haven't often seen the river blue. Mostly dark green … or silver. ‘Once some monks found an old anchor in the mud, and dragged it up here.’ It stands to one side of the courtyard, a double anchor with four hooks – the archaeologists would be interested. ‘The anchor is like our belief, our faith … There was also a crucifix found on the island. The figure of Christ on it is dressed as a monk. On the back there are the waves of the Danube; it's a unique piece, there is nothing quite like it in the world.’

  The monastery also owes its existence to another miracle – the discovery of an ancient stone cross, washed ashore in 1936. Father Atal takes me to see it in a little chapel next to the church. It is a large chunky piece, polished by the fingers of the faithful, softened by their beeswax.16 Another time we could have drunk some of the monastery's excellent wine together, he says, but now it is Lent, and he has chores to attend to. We take our leave, and I drive into the next village to buy bread and wine for my supper. I eat a simple meal overlooking the darkening river, turning slowly silver beneath a full moon.

  Early the next morning I walk down the track to the healing spring. I have a slight limp from a footballing injury. I check there's no one around to offend with my nakedness, then undress and bathe my bad knee in the chill waters. Then I walk back to the church for the start of the early morning service. There are snail tracks in the dust, transparent in the dawn.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Dogs of Giurgiu

  Anything I subsequently experienced had already happened in Ruse. There, the rest of the world was known as ‘Europe’, and if someone sailed up the Danube to Vienna, people said he was going to Europe. Europe began where the Turkish Empire had once ended.

  ELIAS CANETTI, MEMOIRS1

  ON A wide meadow, a headland overlooking a sweeping bend in the Danube, just before the Romanian–Bulgarian border at Silistra, I catch sight of a man striding purposefully beside a line of blue and yellow beehives, evenly spaced like floats on a net across the river. From a distance he looks like a giant. As I walk towards him, he seems to shrink to only a little more than my own height. Standing in front of him, shaking his hand, I notice that he has two or three bee-stings on his face.

  ‘Our first child was born about the time of the revolution,’ Vasile Brici tells me. He has broad, muscular shoulders, and a stripy, Breton T-shirt. ‘I was working in the dockyards in Constanța at that time, loading ships. My wife ran out of breast milk to feed the baby, so we decided to move to the countryside, to buy a cow to replace the missing milk. I had to find a new job, and tried my hand at bee-keeping. I got hooked! … It's like a game of chess. There are twenty frames in each hive. When I open a hive, I have to decide if there is enough wood in each frame, if the queen is old and should be replaced, when the hive needs cleaning, and when the frames should be changed …’

  He has 160 hives, twenty thousand bees in each, and follows the flowers each spring. As each new flower comes into bloom he arrives with his bees. He travels in a large white truck, carefully designed for his hives. ‘They don't enjoy the travelling, but after two days in a new place they settle down and find the flowers they need.’ Now they are busy with the oil-seed rape which paints the meadows above the Danube an intense, fluorescent yellow. Soon the acacia will start – I have been watching its overhanging branches breaking into blossom as I drive down long avenues of trees. ‘Acacia is the best. I can get half as much again for acacia honey – up to six dollars a kilo.’ He earns about ten thousand dollars a year from the honey, he says – by Romanian standards, a living wage. Over more than twenty years, spending seven months a year living with the bees, he has noticed the climate change. ‘The acacia should be over by now, but it hasn't even started.’ The winter was mild, but too long. Before he moves to a new area, he contacts the local farmers’ association to check the crops haven't been sprayed recently; if they have, he avoids the place, to minimise the risk to his bees’ health.

  The daughter he moved to the country for has grown up and left home. Now she lives in Italy. His wife is content in their village. And he is happy out here by the Danube, playing chess with his bees.

  It's still early morning at the ferry crossing from Silistra to Cǎlǎraşi on the left bank. I need a coffee and something to eat, but the girl behind the counter in a wooden shack is sullen; her coffee is lukewarm and tastes burnt. There are no fresh pastries, just soggy croissants in plastic wrapping. Behind her in the shop, packets of biscuits and snacks from all over the world line the walls. But if there ever was a baker in this part of town, he has gone. There are just a few shrivelled apples and peppers in a cardboard box in front of her shop.

  A stubby little tug with a big voice drags the platform which serves as a ferry across the wide green Danube. The Cardinal pushes mine north, the Perla pushes the other, coming the other way, bound for the southern shore. We pass in midstream, and nobody waves. But the helmsmen, high in their turrets, share an almost imperceptible nod, a twitch of their bushy eyebrows. On my ferry there are four cars, a truck carrying timber and two or three men with very short hair and wrap-around sunglasses, their ears glued to mobile phones into which they mutter veiled threats. The river gurgles beneath the bows with supreme disinterest. It has mafiosi like these for breakfast.

  On the far shore, I reach Cǎlǎraşi just in time for my appointment with Marian Neagu, director of the Museum of the Lower Danube. He has promised me thirty minutes, but when I start to ask questions close to his archaeological heart, he closes the door behind us, orders coffees from his secretary, and gives me his whole morning. ‘We think the Danube was a cradle of civilisation, the oldest in Europe and one of the oldest in the world,’ Marian explains. ‘At that time, the river was not a barrier, as it has become in modern times, but a bridge, linking similar civilisations.’ I like the way in which he lumps the Romans with their pouting Venuses, ardent Priaps and river forts, among the ‘moderns’.2

  In prehistory, the Danube delta began here, and spread all the way to the Black Sea. Large communities grew up among the maze of islands, thanks to an abundance of fish, new farming techniques such as ploughing and the absence of enemies. Most of his excavations are on islands in the middle, or on the banks, of the river. He has been working on some settlements for decades. Trade and migration routes, from Anatolia and Thrace to the south-east, and the steppes north of the Black Sea, criss-crossed here. The cows they brought with them provided milk, cheese and meat, and bones for tools and idols.

  In the basement of his museum, Marian carefully unwraps a small object from tissue paper, and hands it to me. A figurine, beautifully shaped, surprisingly light, in the palm of my hand. No face – just a beaked, bird-like nose. Unquestionably a woman – small, firm breasts at the touch of my thumb, buttocks patterned with spirals, a meander on the navel. If she were perched on my desk, I would never be able to take my eyes off her. ‘If you look carefully, you will see that she is in the early stages of pregnancy.’ The woman on whom this figure was modelled gave birth two thousand generations ago. The figurines in his collection portray different stages of pregnancy – three, six and nine months – these last with spreading legs and emphasised genitals, as though at the very moment of giving birth. Not only the shape of the bellies, but the arching of the back is exactly observed in each
case, a local obstetrician told him. Some of the figurines stretch their arms skywards in prayer. Most are missing their heads, in a process known as ‘fragmentation’ – the deliberate breaking off of the head at the neck, a ritual practice in many cultures. The heads of those lucky enough to still have them are thin, inexpressive, with tiny, beak-like noses, and there are lines incised on the thighs, the buttocks and the back – triangles and diagonals and curvilinear lines on the burnt clay. The lines give the figures a special lightness, like curls of smoke, as if they made it possible for the figures to rise slowly through the firelight.

  Upstairs in his museum Marian shows me round. There are two graves with the skeletons buried on their left side, their heads to the east – downriver – in the foetal or ‘hocker’ position, knees raised towards the chest as if in the mother's womb. Red ochre is often found in tombs, symbolising blood, and all the other jewellery and tools the dead might need in the next life. One peculiar feature of Tripol'ye-Cucuteni culture further east is that very few graves have been found. Life in such communities, however prosperous, was short. Few skeletons are found older than thirty years of age. One woman lived to her mid-fifties, and met a violent death with a blow which cracked her skull. ‘Someone thought she had lived too long,’ Marian suggests.

  There are also reproductions of kilns, with clay bases punctured with holes underneath, in which beds of straw and reed were kept burning that could reach 1,100 degrees Celsius, the temperature needed to smelt copper. There is, too, a ceramic jug carefully designed with a spout resembling a woman's nipple, and a tiny hole through which a Copper Age baby sucked. One of the great frustrations of Marian's work is that there is so little money available to pursue it properly. Archaeologists in eastern Europe are dependent on the projects of big foreign universities and archaeologists. The Americans arrive and want to explore the details of relationships between settlements ten miles apart. Local archaeologists have been doing that for years, and would prefer to explore the trade and contact between settlements several hundred miles apart, and to meet and discuss with archaeologists from the Near and Middle East to compare the strange markings on their pots.

  I leave Marian Neagu with his dreams of future cooperation on the shores of the Danube and walk down to the water. This is the small Danube, the less navigated, while the mass of water flows on the far side, around the island of Pacuiul de Soare. Cǎlǎraşi was a steel town in communist times, and by the mid-1970s boasted the most modern steel mill in Romania. But capitalism has been cruel to steel production on the Danube. The Cǎlǎraşi steel mill has stopped completely. Gypsies, hunting for scrap metal, have stripped away anything of value from the factory. The whole complex resembles a ghost town, the windows broken, a sea of chimneys protruding through clean air. Down on the shore, a steel sculpture made of twisted metal petals with filigree trimmings is the flower which made this town famous. But the steel industry has lost its shine. On an earlier visit I saw a couple kissing passionately on the base of that sculpture at sunset, their feet dangling over the river, the soft curves of their human shapes merging, contrasting with the jagged edges of the steel, black against the huge red sun.

  I cross back to Silistra, this time pushed by the Perla, to drive into Bulgaria. I have to buy Bulgarian road tax, but have no leva, the Bulgarian currency. There is no bank in sight, and they will not accept Euros or Romanian lei.

  ‘Do you see that car parked over there? There's a man sitting in it who changes money! Get some from him!’ suggests the helpful border policeman. I make a small transaction, fix the sticker to my windscreen, and set off slowly through the quiet town of Silistra lined with horse-chestnut trees, just coming into flower. Everything feels a little different on the Bulgarian side of the border. While Romania has tried hard to fix the surface of its main roads, to spruce up its main buildings and kit out its filling stations to resemble those of Austria or Germany, Bulgaria gives the impression of caring as little for the trappings of capitalism as its border police care for banks. There's a Balkan feeling in the air, where ‘Balkan’ is something positive, even heroic, suggesting a certain approach to life which values human relationships, including the right to sleep or make love in the afternoon, rather than earn a living. The mood is put succinctly in The Shade of the Balkans, a collection of Bulgarian folksongs and proverbs collected in the late nineteenth century:

  And softly then as the stars to the twilight sing

  So slept the voice that spoke to the mountain-king.

  And as he looked to the gloom of the woodland glades

  The chin of the Balkan drooped and his lips were dumb

  And he was sunk in a dream of days to come.3

  That approach to life was also encouraged by one of Silistra's most unusual sons. Eliezer Papo was a Sephardic rabbi from Bosnia. Born in Sarajevo in 1785, he died in Silistra at the age of only forty-one in 1826, and had made such a strong impression that the town is still a place of pilgrimage for devout Jews. Papo taught that while work is important, keeping God's commandments and laws is the main purpose of life. His most famous work was the Pele Yoetz, a moral treatise arranged according to the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, which begins with the love of God and ends with the word Teshuvah, salvation. According to the entry in the Jewish Encyclopaedia, ‘it implores us to seek salvation not just as a nation, but also as individuals, who place their trust in an omniscient Creator. In between are many of the most fundamental principles, essential philosophical tenets and ethical teachings of Judaism. Each entry in the book is written in a beautiful and articulate language that is accessible and inspiring to all people.’4

  The road west from Silistra cuts inland, past the pelican reserve at Srebarna. The Danube river plain stretches between the Balkan mountains to the south, and the Carpathians to the north. The plain only narrows at the Iron Gates, far upriver. Like the travellers and itinerant preachers of old, I feel myself funnelled westwards, unimpeded. There are fewer horses and carts on the road than on the Romanian side, but fewer cars as well. The Danube meanders between many islands. As other sections of the river have been denied to them, the sturgeon take refuge here, in a river landscape constantly changing with the whims of the river. As the banks erode, trees fall into the water, and if the current does not take them away a new sandbank grows around them as sedimentation from upriver gets trapped against their trunks – good for fish, frustrating for ships’ captains. A Romanian project to fix a bottom ledge or sill to one section of the river, to slow sedimentation and provide a standard 2.5 metre deep waterway year round, has drawn protests from the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), the guardians of the river.5 ‘The project … threatens the last naturally reproducing populations of wild sturgeons in European watersheds,’ warns the WWF. Transport companies complain that their barge convoys have to be broken up, and that in low water conditions they have to make a hundred-kilometre detour around islands in the river. There are many weeks in the year when this stretch cannot be navigated at all.

  The transport lobby has the upper hand, and the most the environmentalists have been able to achieve is that fish will be monitored for signs of harm as the project goes ahead.

  In Turkish times, Romanian shepherds would travel with their flocks down the Danube, then across the Black Sea to Constantinople to sell the animals in the markets. As they couldn't afford to keep their dogs with them on the boat, they left them behind in the harbour at Giurgiu. There they would howl for their lost masters. Hence the threat still used in modern Romanian: ‘I will hit you so hard, you will hear the dogs barking in Giurgiu!’

  The reputation of Giurgiu in modern times is hardly more attractive. For years, the chemical works spewed out tonnes of toxic fumes across the Danube to the more beautiful city of Ruse on the Bulgarian shore. The bridge of Friendship and Unity, built in 1954 as a prestige project between two communist allies, became a bridge of hatred and suspicion. By 1988 the people of Ruse had had enough. They marched on the Communist Party headquarters, women
pushing prams, students, old people, demanding the Romanian factories be closed. Unwilling to be left out, the communist youth movement joined them. The Romanian comrades tried to complain about factory chimneys on the Ruse side too, but they could hardly argue with the direction of the prevailing wind – north-westerly, taking their bad breath to Bulgaria. Out of all this a movement called Ecoglasnost was born, and grievances about environmental pollution soon spread to other frustrations with single party rule. Just as at Nagymaros, upstream in Hungary, the Bulgarian protest movement that brought down the communist regime in 1989 owed much to the people of the Danube.6

  Years before, at the Romanian end of the bridge, I watched a Turkish truck, loaded to the roof with televisions, taken apart by zealous Romanian customs officers searching for drugs. Sniffer dogs leapt in vain between the cardboard boxes. Vast X-ray machines examined every nook and cranny. The Turkish driver looked on, stroking the two-day growth of beard on his chin with a mixture of frustration and resignation. Eventually he was sent on his way, minus one day of his life.