The Danube (16 page)

The exact relationship of the different peoples to one another, their belief systems and their forms of organisation are the subject of fierce debate. The discussion focuses particularly on the discovery of several thousand tiny, wide-hipped, exquisitely decorated female figurines at sites across the region. Many were found in the sitting position, with tiny thrones or chairs – the Thinker at Cernavodǎ was also portrayed on a small stool. These were central to the matriarchal theory of Marija Gimbutas. She named one such collection of figurines ‘the council of the goddesses’. A younger generation of archaeologists, led by the American Douglass Bailey, has challenged the matriarchal theory, suggesting that there is no proof of this whatsoever, and that such theories have more to do with the feminism of the 1970s or to Lithuanian folklore than to the mysterious pots, jewellery, tools, weapons and settlement plans of the late Stone Age.
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He accuses Marija Gimbutas of leapfrogging millennia, to suggest an unbroken continuity of folk beliefs and religious practices from the late Stone Age to pre-modern times. These were
settled peoples with a regular supply of food from agriculture, fishing and hunting, Bailey argues – they had no need to invoke goddesses or gods. Instead he suggests we should look rather at the size of the figures. ‘Contemporary psychological studies have shown that something very odd happens to the human mind when one handles or plays with miniature objects … we enter another world, one in which our perception of time is altered and in which our abilities of concentration are affected.’ The figurines should rather be seen as playthings, easily made and easily discarded, he suggests, telling us more about fashion – the lines on their bodies suggest close fitting tunics, or even body paint – than their beliefs.

For myself, a stranger following the snaking river inland from the sea, I find much to admire in both approaches, and no real contradiction. But only Gimbutas gives clues to the kind of world which people might have entered as they fingered the figurines.

The nuclear power station gives Cernavodǎ a modern, nervous, self-important air, with policemen checking cars at the roadside, more expensive hotels than elsewhere in Dobrogea, and electricity pylons marching off impatiently through the vine-clad hills like men with a mission. There are even ladies of easy virtue, dawdling in doorways in a small street near the canal.

Ionel Bucur might have mentioned a third wonder of the town – the Anghel Saligny Bridge. Saligny was just thirty-three years old when he designed Romania's longest and boldest bridge, to take the new Bucharest to Black Sea railway across the Borcea arm of the Danube. The tender was won against fierce foreign competition, not least from British firms that were already busy laying the country's new railways. On 15 September 1895, twenty thousand people flocked from all over the country to see the opening of this architectural miracle, at four thousand metres the longest steel structure at that time in Europe.
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King Carol I was there in person, with five hundred guests of honour. Would the steel structure hold for its first test? Fifteen heavy locomotives tore over it at eighty kilometres per hour. To prove his unflagging faith in his own creation, Anghel Saligny sat under the bridge in a rowing-boat, calmly smoking his pipe. The bridge held, and the way was open for goods and passenger transport to the Black Sea at Constanța. The bridge is still there, though it has now been bypassed by a less elegant, more
utilitarian, creation. The removal of the wooden sleepers and the track has stripped it of some of its original glory, but two stone soldiers still stand guard, and there is a statue of the young Saligny himself, triumphant. Underneath, horses graze on the spring grass, next to bush willows along the banks of the Danube, and a lone cow with a bell round its neck, clanking as she munches. A goods train passes slowly, endlessly over the new bridge, bound for the coast, hooting mournfully. Then the sound of the birds swells up again around it, interrupted only by the
zag, zag
of passing cars. The river is mud brown, ponderous, lost in its own memories. To one side is a long, low building and an enclosure of wooden fence-posts. A herd of sheep, somewhat the worse for wear, fan out across the rivery landscape. If the grass and the foliage were lusher it might have been painted by Turner.

The Danube canal stretches, straight as a bullet, eastwards towards Constanța, sixty-five kilometres away. First conceived in 1837, it took the brutality of the communist system, its industrialising frenzy and a cheap supply of human lives to get it started in 1949. Up to a hundred thousand men and women worked here, and several tens of thousands died of poor food and medical care, the cruelty of the conditions, and the harshness of winter, before the project was suspended in 1953. The route taken to the coast proved too hard. Today's canal was resumed, along a simpler route, and completed in 1984. In the early 1950s, this was a dumping ground for all social and political opponents of the communist regime, better-off peasants, priests and anyone else the authorities took a dislike to.
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There was little earth-moving equipment, so the inmates had to work with shovels and spades. Elena Sibiscanu was born in 1938, and still lives on the hill near the cemetery, looking down on the Columbia district below. Columbia was one of the most notorious prison colonies. As a child in 1949 she remembers going to play on the cliff overlooking it. ‘After seven or eight in the evening, we would hear the women singing sad songs, on the steps of their barracks. My father used to take bricks and other materials in his cart inside, and he would sometimes smuggle out notes from the prisoners to their relatives. He also used to take cheap cigarettes in for them, though he was strictly forbidden to speak to the prisoners.’

The most dangerous work her parents did was to act as go-betweens for family members, some of whom would come to their house, late at night, when her parents thought the children were fast asleep. But the children
knew something was afoot, and listened behind the door. ‘I remember one family telling my parents they were from Timişoara – in the west of Romania – and that their relatives had been sent to the camp for not fulfilling the quota of food they had to give to the state as peasant farmers.’ There were three layers of barbed wire fence, nine to twelve feet high around the colony. In the morning the inmates would be marched along the section of the canal they had already dug, to a point in front of where the nuclear power station is now, where they were digging through a hill. ‘The winters were particularly cold, and the wind was bitter. In the winter of 1952 two or three inmates died a day. They would bring the bodies in wooden carts, after dark, up near our house to the cemetery. We used to run along behind. The cops (she uses the Romanian slang,
caraliu
) would point their guns and shout at us to go away, but we followed them into the cemetery, and watched them dump a pile of bodies into a mass grave, right behind the church.’ She shows me the place, overgrown and strewn with rubbish, though the rest of the graveyard is nicely kept. We look in silence over the town. The red bridge over the canal, built at the request of the power station, contrasts with the bright green cap of the minaret. Communism could never brook dissent, least of all in the 1950s, the years of iron and steel. It was as blind a faith as that of the medieval churches, but without the figure of Christ or the hope of redemption. The camp was finally shut down in July 1953 when Stalin died, and work temporarily abandoned. Historians estimate that 100,000 people took part in the forced labour on the canal, and that at least 10,000 of them died.

From Cernavodǎ the road runs east beside the canal. Just after Poarta Albǎ a concrete column stands like a totem pole between the road and the waterway. Eleven massive concrete crosses, three on the ground, eight stacked in a child's tower above them, stand in an ‘L’ shape, with the words: ‘In memory of the martyrs’. Each cross carries the name of a prison camp: Constanța, Midia, Peninsula, Galesul, Noua Culme, Poarta Albǎ, Medgidia, Saligny, Columbia. Poarta Albǎ was the largest, with up to 12,000 inmates. In Romanian it means ‘the white gate’. A poem, written by a survivor, is carved in the concrete at the foot of the column.

Further east along the canal lies the small town of Murfatlar. The crisp, fruity white wine produced here is not the most delicious of the Romanian vintages, but is the best marketed. A huge wooden barrel on a vine-clad hill marks the entrance to the vineyards. I drive on with an altogether different goal in mind – the tenth-century cave churches of Basarabi.

Huge trucks laden with limestone form a constant thundercloud in front of the wooden scaffolding that covers a cliff face. The guardian of the cave complex, a woman with a large Alsatian dog, emerges from behind her washing lines and points me over a rickety wooden bridge. Discovered in 1957 during efforts to expand the limestone quarry next door, the caves are still not open to the public. Romania's own little Cappadocia – chapel after chapel with curious, intricate, crude shapes carved in white rock – is almost unknown. There are madonnas and saints, water-birds observed in the wetlands of the Danube, monsters and dragons, and what looks like a Viking ship, evidence of a Viking trade route from Scandinavia to Constantinople.
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To reach the chapels, you walk along wooden platforms and stairways built up against the cliff face. Even the sound of the trucks passing below fades to nothing in the inner recesses of places of worship abandoned a thousand years ago. The Romans quarried limestone blocks from here in long terraces, to build three ‘Trajan's walls’ across Dobrogea to keep out the tribes invading from the north. When the Romans left, the Christians of the Byzantine empire burrowed inwards from the terraces in the soft rock to escape their enemies, or for a little peace and quiet for their worship. They carved out naves and chapels, arches and apses, the same shapes, only smaller, as the basilicas of the early Christians.

There are also runic inscriptions, little hooked letters, carved over haloed saints. These figures are a bone of contention between Romanians and Bulgarians.
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The Romanians trace their origins to a happy marriage between the Dacians, a tribe that inhabited the Lower Danube region, and the Romans who arrived to conquer them in
AD
101. The Roman emperor Trajan defeated the Dacian chief Decebal and destroyed his capital Sarmizegetusa in
AD
106. The provinces of Moesia and Wallachia were annexed to the Roman empire, bringing it right down to the shores of the Black Sea. Some Classical Greek authors called the Dacians the Getae, while others believed the Getae were the easterly branch of the Dacian tribe, with the same language but different gods. Whoever they were, they
adopted the language of the conquerors. When the Romans left in around
AD
300 the native Romanians remained and became an integral part of the Byzantine empire, runs this particular narrative. But there are missing pieces in the puzzle. There is no story of the conversion of the Romanians to Christianity, a crucial milestone in the history of any Christian nation. There is no further trace of the Latin-based language that Romanian was to become until the twelfth century. And to make matters worse, Bulgarian linguists claim evidence of their own conversion to Christianity in these very caves.

Central to the Bulgarian argument are the Alans, a people closely associated with the proto-Bulgarians, who lived in western Ukraine and the Dobrogea region in the first centuries after Christ. Seven of the runic characters found at Murfatlar are contained in an inscription from southern Ukraine, which has been interpreted as ‘the Khan (or leader) of the Alans’. In the Basarabi caves, a man with a fine, drooping moustache, clearly dressed in a monk's habit, with a halo round his head and a large stylised cross in his left hand, is identified in the runes as Saint John the Baptist – converting the Bulgarians. Bulgarian researchers also claim to have deciphered a whole sentence at Basarabi, in the Alano-Kassogian alphabet: THE SOWING OF THE HOLY TEMPLE OF GOD WATERS AND FEEDS LIKE AN IRRIGATOR THE DRYNESS. Romanian scholars, however, say this is fanciful. ‘Only some Bulgarian scientists try to assign Runic inscriptions, as well as the entire complex, to Bulgarians, an opinion not accepted by the scientific community,’ wrote Constantin Chera. ‘The monuments in Basarabi confirm Byzantine writers Cedren and Attaleiates’ information about the existence of Romanians in the Lower Danube, as well as other, much less numerous populations, in Dobrogea.’
¹¹

In 2007, the name ‘Basarabi’ was changed back to its old Turkish name ‘Murfatlar’. This comes from the Turkish
murvet
, which means ‘a generous man’ – as good an etymology of a town as I have ever heard, and one likely to bring blessings of one sort or another.

After so much time in Dobrogea, I begin to worry if I will ever make progress upstream. But I should visit one last person in Medgidia before I move on. The town is a bastion of the Turkish-Tatar people and the Islamic faith in Romania. Originally a humble village called Karasu, or Black Water,
it was rebuilt by the Ottomans in the mid-nineteenth century on a carefully planned grid of streets, and renamed after Sultan Abdul Medjid. The population was swollen with Muslim refugees from the Crimean War. That was how Ayhan's family, Tatars from the Crimea, reached the Dobrogea.

Ayhan is just nineteen and already an imam. He has been appointed in the village of Negru Voda, a place which, like almost every other name here, means black water in Romanian. Black permeates the landscape of Dobrogea – Black Sea, Black Forest and Black Water. I was first introduced to Ayhan by his teacher at the Turkish-Romanian high school on an earlier trip, but this time we talk alone, in a Turkish restaurant, with a Turkish soccer game on a big television screen above our heads, over a hearty lunch of long, thin Turkish pizzas, like elegant slippers. His family settled in Techirghiol, about thirty miles to the east, at the beginning of the twentieth century. He tells a story about the lake. A man called Techir was trying to get rid of his lame donkey, and walked it into the waters of the lake (
ghiol
in Turkish). But then he saw that the mud of the lake healed the animal's legs. People have treasured it ever since. King Carol II of Romania even had a holiday home there, where his son Michael learnt to ride and hunt. Ayhan's father worked in the shipyards in Constanța, making ropes known as
parima
, with which the ships were tied to the shore. When Ayhan decided to become an imam his mother was not pleased, but he took inspiration from his paternal grandfather, who was also a man of faith. As for himself, ‘I would like to marry a Turkish or Tatar girl,’ Ayhan says. According to the 2010 census there are fifty thousand Turks and Tatars left in Romania, most of them in Dobrogea. ‘But God is great, he alone knows what will happen …’ To be a Muslim, he says, means to respect one's parents and the elders of the community, to pray five times a day, and to keep the feasts. He has no qualms about studying in Romanian schools where modern history is taught as the story of battle after battle to shake off the Turkish yoke. ‘One of my teachers nicknamed me “Ottoman”, which hurt me at first, until I got used to it.’ He feels no disadvantage from belonging to a religious and cultural minority. His dream is to study at university in Turkey. He has been there several times, and wept with joy at the beautiful way the morning prayer, the
ezan,
was sung in the city of Edirne. Not long before our meeting Osama Bin Laden was killed by US forces in Pakistan. Ayhan shrugs, as if I had asked him about a football
team in a distant city. ‘I didn't feel anything for Bin Laden,’ he says. And he has never come across any signs of radical Islam in Romania. Nonetheless, he hopes for a revival of Islam in his own community and sees some indication of it. His maternal grandfather worked on the Danube canal in the 1970s. Once Ceauşescu visited the project, and announced that when he came again, in three months’ time, the canal should have reached a certain tree. No matter how hard the men worked, they were still far from the tree as the deadline approached. With their foreman's connivance, the tree was carefully cut down and reassembled at the point they actually had reached. Even the leaves of the tree were painted green, to please the mad dictator.