The Danube (14 page)

I have to be at the border-crossing at Giurgiuleşti by eight in the morning. A cluster of low, modern buildings, freshly tarmacked roads, and police officers with a spring in their step are waiting for me. Part-funded by the European Union, this is one of the EU's newest frontiers with Moldova. They show me the latest X-ray equipment for searching lorries and a gleaming scanner designed to detect radioactive goods – donated by the Americans. It looks as though it has never been used.

The real war at this border-crossing point is on tobacco. Cigarettes have long held a special magic in Romania. In communist times, imported packets of Kent almost became an alternative currency. An American colleague once took out a packet and lit one in a Bucharest restaurant. The place fell silent as people watched in horror. It was as if he had produced a handful of banknotes and set fire to them. Nistor Dorin takes me from warehouse to warehouse, stacked to the roof with cigarettes. All the famous brands are here, alongside some rather quaint imitations – Chinese-made Camels with a picture of a goat on the packet. About half the cigarettes are genuine, my guide explains, manufactured by the big tobacco companies in Ukraine, Russia and Moldova, with only the smallest tax slapped on them by the state. Since Romania and Bulgaria joined the EU in 2007, new compulsory taxes have doubled and quadrupled the price. Neither
petty traders nor large-scale smugglers need a degree in mathematics to grasp the money to be made. Legally, you are allowed to bring two packets into Romania a day. The same packet of Marlboro or Kent costs eighty eurocents in Moldova, two and a half Euros in Romania. A single, unemployed man receives a pitiful twenty-five Euros a month from the state. If he crosses every day for a month, bringing over only his quota, then sells them for two Euros a packet on the black market, he can earn seventy-two Euros. He would almost be foolish not to. A successful smuggler, however, who gets a big quantity into the country – concealed in a shipment of barbecue charcoal, a false petrol tank or a shipment of detergent – can buy a nice flat in the city and still have money left over.

The trade is causing such a dent in the profit margins of the big manufacturers that Philip Morris considered closing down their state-of-the-art cigarette factory in Bucharest and moving out of the country. The authorities responded by stopping the Duty-Free shops – where about a third of all smuggled cigarettes originate – from selling tobacco products or alcohol and introducing more checks at borders. Suspicious-looking vehicles are driven through a giant scanner at Giurgiuleşti. Police intelligence operations have been stepped up. Dorel Fronea, the head of Romanian customs tells me that nationwide seven new sniffer dog teams have been trained, in addition to the three existing ones. A customer-awareness campaign has also been launched – it's dangerous to smoke what you buy in the street because you don't know what's in it. It is difficult not to smile at this point in the conversation; surely it's also dangerous to smoke because you
do
know what's in it? Surveys show, Mr Fronea assures me, that five out of every hundred Romanians will not smoke a cigarette if they know it is counterfeit, but taken another way, this proves a healthy, or perhaps an unhealthy, disrespect for the state in all its glory. The authorities are hurt by the claims of cigarette companies that one in three cigarettes smoked in Romania has been smuggled. They suggest the true figure is closer to one in five. A hundred and twenty million cigarettes were seized at the borders in 2009.

There are three border crossings at Giurgiuleşti: one on the road, one on the railway and the third on the river. The road and rail bridges cross the River Prut, which forms much of Romania's long border with Moldova. A police launch is waiting to take me down the Prut, to its confluence with the Danube, then back up the Danube to Galați. The Polish-built, harpoon
fibreglass police launch is like a stone, skimming waves of liquid glass, her stern anchored in the water, the bow bouncing, breathless and brave. Marcel the helmsman bends down to shout something in my ear, above the roar of the outboard motor, and as he does so the collars of our orange lifejackets rub together. ‘We have to be careful,’ he bellows, gripping the steering wheel with one hand and looking over my shoulder as he shouts, ‘because if we hit one of those, we'll sink in seconds!’ He nods to a whole tree trunk, tumbling past in the grey waters, only a metre to starboard. The boat is small with a cabin for two, with room for two more in the cockpit. From the Prut we reach the Danube, a vast backhand of waters, divided by knuckles, thin stands of trees. The waves get bigger. It is hard to tell which are islands and which the tail-ends of forest in this borderland of rivers. The Danube is in flood, shouldering its way round the last lap of its long race. But there is no competition. The Danube is the queen of rivers, and any which join it now are more like fans or admirers, jogging the last stretch before the finishing line on the Black Sea shore.

To our left are the cranes of Giurgiuleşti, the round barrels of an oil terminal, and a big blue aunt of a ship moored alongside. Beyond that, further down, the Moldovan border gives way to the Ukrainian and Chilia arm. We pass lone, sullen anglers, wary of police who might deny them their catch, even their nets. In places here, the Danube is fifty or sixty metres deep, swirling whirlpools of brown and green water. Barges pass in both directions, carrying gravel or ore, as do sea-going ships bound for Galați or Brǎila, the last ports with waters deep enough and harbours big enough to load and unload sea-going cargoes. The sun comes out just as we bounce into Galați. On the grass beneath the harbour-master's control tower, surrounded by housing estates on three sides and the river on the fourth, vehicles confiscated from tobacco smugglers are on display. Trucks, coaches, cars, camper vans and power boats stand side by side. A change in Romanian law allows the vehicles smugglers use to be confiscated, then auctioned. Confiscated cigarettes also used to be sold, but the temptation to pocket a packet or two was so great they are now burned. On my way into a warehouse in a disused, red-brick school, I see nets in the first room – seized from fishermen during the spawning season, or because the mesh is finer than that sanctioned by law. In an inside room, more cigarette packets are stacked high to the ceiling. Viceroy, L & M, Pall Mall, Winston,
and Regal are joined by the more religious St George. The room is infused with the dark, delicious smell of illicit tobacco.

Captain Virgiliu Cioban looks out from his window at the port of Galați. As deputy director of the Harbour Authority, he is responsible for keeping the broad Danube here safe for navigation – for the buoys, lighthouses and signals connected with the river. That means keeping the main navigable channel along the 170-kilometre stretch from Brǎila to the Black Sea seven metres deep, so that sea-going vessels can pass. But there's less and less traffic on the river, he laments. In the early 1990s, there would be forty ships passing at a time, and two hundred waiting. That was the time when the forests of Romania, especially from the slopes of the Carpathians in the north, on the border with Ukraine, were being chopped down for export. ‘Millions of trees passed down the Danube, bound for Britain, France, the north of Europe, and even North Africa,’ he recalls. Now traffic is down to 2,500 to 3,000 ships a year. Of those, about two hundred stop at the shipyard in Galați for repairs. Iron ore, bauxite, coke and coal are the main goods coming upriver, mostly from Russia and Ukraine. Petroleum products, steel and grain make up the rest.

There's an exhibition just opening at the Galați History Museum when I arrive, dedicated to the city's large Greek community. Rodika Zamfiropol takes me under her wing. The exhibition mostly consists of books and photographs. There have been Greeks in Dobrogea for 2,700 years – about 2,000 years longer than the Turks, the Greeks like to mention – but the communist years were hard on them. Seven hundred Greeks live in Galați today, and there's something of a revival. The treasures of the exhibition include all four volumes of Nicolas de Nicolae's
Orientation et Navigation Orientale
, printed in Lyon in 1568. My namesake fought the Austrians at the battle of Perpignan in 1542, then served three French kings as soldier, diplomat and geographer. His book is a description of his journey in 1551, together with Henry II's ambassador Gabriel d'Aramont, to hold talks with Suleiman the Magnificent in Constantinople, and includes ‘descriptions of the clothing of the men, as well as of the women’, in the countries he visited. In another hall of the museum a series of caricatures mocks the quarrels between the great powers for control of the Lower Danube in the nineteenth century. One shows a youthful-looking Charles Hartley, the British engineer who regulated the Sulina arm, standing astride the
St George branch of the river with a rather overweight Frenchman behind him, both wielding curved, Turkish-style swords. Out at sea is a windmill, with the flags of the UK, France, Russia and Austria fixed to its sails. ‘Don Quixote, (Charles Hartley)’, reads the caption, ‘chief engineer, tilting at windmills on the Lower Danube.’ The lighthouse at Sulina is next to the Englishman's right foot and large sailing boats enter the Danube between his legs.

Down in the harbour a paddle steamer, the
Tudor Vladimirescu
, is moored to the pier. Built in 1854, she's the oldest paddle steamer still on the river. The first, the aptly named
Argo
, arrived in the city just twenty years earlier, in 1834. In the nineteenth century the Austrians, and later the Hungarians, dominated shipping on the river. The
Tudor Vladimirescu
was originally named the
Croatia
, and built at the Ganz-Danubius shipyard in Budapest. Sixty metres long and fifteen wide, she was handed over to Romania by Hungary as part of the reparations for the First World War, and renamed after a Romanian revolutionary from the early 1820s. After the Second World War, many ships were seized by the Russians when they occupied Romania. The ship – by then known as the
Sarmizegetusa
, the capital of the Dacian king Burebista – escaped requisitioning because she was considered too old. She was kept in service as a passenger ship between the Iron Gates and Tulcea, and was finally restored to her ancient glory in 2003, with dark green funnels embossed with the letters NR for Navrom, the Romanian state shipping company which owns her, and a big brass bell on the bow. As we talk on deck, an elderly man comes down the gangplank, selling orange windsocks he has made himself – ‘Captain's pricks’, as they are known in Romanian. On the Danube beside us, a Ukrainian ship, the
Petrozavodsk
, passes slowly downstream. The
Tudor Vladimirescu
can take a hundred passengers in style on its irregular journeys on the river. Such trips are not cheap, as it costs five thousand Euros just to start the engines and keep them running for twenty-four hours to reach the right pressure. He takes me down into the engine room, where the oil was originally mixed with sheep's fat to keep it at the right consistency. The original wooden paddles have now been replaced with steel ones, since one used to break on every trip.

I leave Galați at lunchtime, closely following the Danube on the road to Brǎila, my head humming with the red wine from the Greek reception.
On the right, the huge steelworks, which once employed fifty thousand men and women, stretches along the horizon. I lose count after twenty chimneys. Now owned by Mittal Steel, less than nine thousand work there today. The factory is on the shore of the Siret river, whose name means ‘love’ in Hungarian. Flowing parallel to the Prut, the Siret brings the snow-melt down from the eastern slopes of the Carpathians, its source 700 kilometres away in northern Bukovina.

There has been no road sign for a while, so I stop to ask a man with a handsaw, crossing the river. Straight on for the river ferry he reassures me. Does he need a lift himself? But he only has a few hundred metres left to walk, to the woods at the confluence of the Siret and the Danube, where he is going to cut himself a nice new handle for his rake.

The ferry across the Danube is called the
Racheta
, ‘the rocket’, but is as quiet as a mouse. Her counterpart, the
Condor
, passes us in midstream. White seagulls stand out against the rust-brown waters of the river. An elderly couple ask for a lift to the town of Măcin, just down the road. The man has just collected his wife from hospital, and buses are few and far between on this stretch. He used to quarry granite at Măcin. His job was to drill holes in the rock face for sticks of dynamite, but he fell ill with silicosis after twenty-four years and was forced to retire. It's a mark of local pride that granite from here was used at the Olympic Games in Munich in 1972, though no one seems to know exactly what for. His wife made corks for the Niculițel wine bottles. Huge flocks of birds follow a red tractor, ploughing the fields at the foot of the Măcin hills. ‘Somewhere up there,’ says the woman, pointing from the back seat, ‘there's a holy spring, and a monastery.’ Her reverent tone suggests that it is thanks to those healing waters that she and her husband are still alive, rather than the hospital she has just visited.

No sooner have they said goodbye than a younger couple flag me down. ‘The wind from the East ripens the harvest, but dries everything out,’ the man tells me. He doesn't fish in the Danube, just in the fishing ponds, but even they have been privatised, he complains. He was an apprentice in November 1987 at the Red Flag Truck Factory in Braşov when the uprising against the Ceauşescu dictatorship began. After the revolution, he went to work in Italy. They have three sons, two working in Turin, one in Tulcea. There's no work in Romania. Soon he will return to Italy himself.

The hills of western Dobrogea roll like waves towards the sea. I turn off right from the main road to the large Russian village of Ghindǎreşti, where Nicu Artion and David Kondrat are waiting for me in the village hall. Nicu has a striking silver beard, typical of the Russian men of Dobrogea. ‘We don't actually have to have beards any more,’ he confesses, ‘I shaved it off once … but then it grew back … We've been here 360 years,’ he says, as if he remembers every one of them personally, and relates the foundation story of his community, how the reforming Patriarch Nikon ordered the Orthodox faithful in Russia to cross themselves in a different way. Nikon's aim was to harmonise Russian Orthodox with what he believed was the more ancient Greek Orthodox practice in ritual and liturgy, to return to the ‘roots’ of the Orthodox Church. In fact, the Greek liturgy had been steadily revised, and Russian practice was closer to the old writings, though this was not apparent at the time. Nikon was strongly backed by Tsar Alexis I, who welcomed the idea of Russia liberating all Orthodox Christians from Muslim rule. The Old Believers, several hundred thousand people who clung to the old ways, fled into exile rather than accept the new practice. They were welcomed in the Ottoman empire, in the best tradition of Islamic tolerance of other faiths, and given land to farm. Forty thousand still live in Dobrogea. By the time Tsar Nicholas II introduced an Act of Religious Freedom in 1905 it was too late to tempt them back.
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