The Danube (21 page)

Stela notices climate change in several ways. During the eight years she has worked as director of the park, the Danube has not frozen over once, although this used to be commonplace. But extremes of weather seem to be increasing in other ways, with more sudden storms on the river and wild fluctuations in the water level from one day to the next. Several of her colleagues are away on a field trip downriver in a small boat from Vidin as part of a project to track the numbers of two endangered birds, the sand martin and the little ringed plover, down the whole length of the Danube. We climb up into the observation tower. An olive green military van of the Bulgarian prison service drives a batch of new prisoners over a small bridge on to the island. Everything is green here, even the prison vehicles.

The Danube flows past Belene like a solid mass, a moving carpet. ‘Its impossible to say exactly how many islands there are,’ says Stela. ‘Some disappear one day, others appear the next.’

The Danube shore on the right, southern bank is steep, a cliff rising vertically from the water, while the left bank on the Romanian shore is low marshland. The road from Belene descends to the plain of Nikopol, the old Nikopolis. The ruins of the west wall of the Roman fort, built by the emperor Marcus Aurelius in
AD
169, crumble gently into oblivion. It was a Roman victory,
nike
, over the Dacians, forgotten by all except the schoolchildren and tourists in little Danubian museums. A thermal power station on the far bank hisses and roars, periodically releasing an accumulation of steam like a wrestler between rounds. From another chimney, a thin trail of yellow smoke rises, like urine – the shoreline industries of the Romanian town of Turnu Mǎgurele. The sky is restless, and great rolls of black cloud, black as the tarred hulls of fishing boats, swoop down from the Carpathians, though the sun still shines on the Bulgarian shore. A Romanian barge, moored to the dock with its bow upstream, waits for a load of gravel that passes through a long contraption of conveyor belts and chutes. The Danube is strangely calm, reflecting it all. Images of Romanian factories alternate black and white in the colourless river.

By naming his new town after a particular battle, Marcus Aurelius seems to have set the scene for a spate of decisive battles in the history of the place. On the plains of Nikopolis, the flower of British, French, Dutch, Hungarian and Spanish youth met their doom in 1396 in the last,
disastrous crusade, against a disciplined army of Turks and Serbs.
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By all accounts, they rather deserved it. The crusaders, led by King Sigismund of Hungary, were stung into action by the daring raids of the forces of the Turkish sultan, Bayezid the Thunderbolt, from his fortresses at Nikopolis, Lom and Vidin on the Danube. Sigismund and his allies gathered at Buda in May 1386, and ignoring Sigismund's advice, provided on account of knowledge gleaned from his own long rivalry with the Ottomans, took the offensive, marching down the valley of the Danube as far as Nikopolis, looting, pillaging and raping each Christian, Jewish or Muslim community in their path. Fortified by the excellent wines they found on the shores of the Morava river in Serbia, they camped in front of Nikopolis, preparing to annihilate the small Turkish garrison at their leisure. ‘The Western knights, with no enemy to fight, treated the whole operation in the spirit of a picnic,’ writes Patrick Kinross. When Bayezid finally arrived to do battle in November, with a force at least as large as their own, – twice as large according to some accounts – the French troops were so keen to prove themselves in battle, to justify their resentment that the expedition had been placed under Hungarian command, that they charged the enemy against the express orders of the ever-cautious Sigismund. The best report of what happened next comes from a French survivor, Jean Froissart. At the head of the French troops, Philippe d'Elu called to his standard-bearer, ‘Forward banner, in the name of God and Saint George, for they will see me today a good chevalier!’ Seven hundred French cavalry charged uphill, scattering the weak auxiliary troops of the Ottomans. Just beyond the brow of the hill, however, the full force of Bayezid's troops lay in wait. ‘The crusaders were still, by the standards of the time, essentially amateur soldiers, fighting in the past and in a romantic spirit. They had learned nothing of the professional art of war as it progressed through the centuries, none of the military skills of the Turks, with their superior discipline, training, briefing and tactics, and above all the mobility of their light-armoured forces and archers on horseback,’ writes Kinross.
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The men of the last crusade were massacred. After several hours, the remnants of the army split, some fleeing to their boats to sail back up the Danube, others beginning a long march home beside the river and across the Carpathians, where survivors from the villages they had torched on the way took revenge on them. The day after the battle, Bayezid had all ten thousand prisoners
executed, except for the Count of Nevers and his entourage who were forced to witness the beheading of their men, one by one, roped together like cattle.

I meet Vasile Popov by the shore in modern Nikopol, watching the approach of a storm from the north. He's a handsome man in the camouflage jacket favoured by all Balkan men who keep their old leather one for special occasions and whose denim jackets of their youth are now too threadbare, too small, or have been purloined by granddaughters. He also has a fine moustache, slightly reminiscent of Joseph Stalin, but a much kinder smile. His first Danube story is just hearsay, a tale fondly told in the town, of how in the bitter winter of 1956, a logjam of ice threatened to destroy Nikopol, forming a solid wall and forcing the river to flood its banks. The Romanian army opened fire with mortars, shattering the ice-flows, which then obediently resumed their passage downriver. The town was saved. Exactly half a century later, during the floods of April 2006, Vasile personally took the President of Bulgaria, Petar Stoyanov, on his boat through the flooded town, to show him the damage and to press the locals’ claims for compensation. That same spring, he took his two daughters to the school graduation ball by boat through the still-flooded streets. The girls stepped elegantly ashore in their long dresses.

Vasile works for the town council; ‘there's no other work here … apart from the factory making electricity metres, which has already closed.’ Even the foundations of the old factory have been stripped to the bone by the Gypsies, he says, in their hunger for scrap metal. He used to fish from his own boat, and his best catch was a female sturgeon weighing ninety-five kilos, with twenty-two kilos of caviar. The caviar he sold for three hundred dollars a kilo, keeping only a small plateful for himself and his family to taste – ‘fishermen always sell what they can, and keep the worst bits for themselves … I managed to pay for my daughters to finish their education, in mathematics and foreign languages, with that fish,’ he says proudly. But the story has an unhappy ending. The same year, he caught hepatitis from a dirty needle used by the dentist who was fixing his teeth, and spent the rest of the money getting the treatment he needed to combat the illness. He has still not got back his strength. ‘I used to be so strong I could change car tyres by lifting the whole car up with one hand, and replacing the wheel
with the other.’ Now he can't even go out fishing any more, has sold his boat, and lives on his two hundred dollars a month salary from the town council. He loves talking about fishing. There was a lake to the west of the town, where large fish, catfish and amur, got trapped by the changes in the level of the river. Men would beat on the water with sticks, while others would wait with nets across the mouth of the narrow channel, which led the water back to the Danube. ‘They jumped like dolphins – straight into our nets,’ he laughs. He also used to catch amur, a big carp-like fish imported into Europe from the Far East, using cherry tomatoes as bait.

Just as Nikopol witnessed the start of Ottoman domination of the Balkans, events here beside the Danube were also central to its end. In 1812 at the Treaty of Bucharest, the border between the Russian and Ottoman empires was established along the Prut river. Four hundred and twenty years after the Turks first occupied wide swathes of south-eastern Europe, their political and military strength lay in ruins. Historians have long debated how exactly the Ottomans, so effective in the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, lost their grip. A Turkish historian, Mehmed Genç, argues that the failure of the Turkish authorities to supply their armies with weapons, tents and food properly, especially from 1750 onwards, was the main problem.
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One reason for this was that the army refused to pay the market price for their goods, and depended on several large suppliers. Their supplies, however, were exhausted and they were pushed to the brink of bankruptcy by the delays, or even the complete failure, of the state to pay. Research by the Hungarian historian Gábor Ágoston has added further reasons – the fact that many of the supplies came not from the Turkish motherland, but rather from Bosnia, involving a long journey first through the mountains, then up the Danube.
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Yet another cause of the defeats in the age of gunpowder was the very variable technical quality of both firearms and ammunition.

The collapse of the Ottoman empire would tax the minds and budgets, and stimulate the ambitions, of European statesmen for the next hundred years. The essence of what came to be known as the ‘Eastern Question’ was whether, as the German statesman Count Metternich put it, the Sick Man of Europe (Turkey) ‘be sent to the doctor, or to his heirs’ – that is, the many states still under Ottoman control, all straining for independence.
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The River Danube was to play a crucial role in the strategic diplomacy,
wars and skirmishes that followed. By 1852, a third of all shipping on the Danube was British. The first steamships had appeared on the river in the 1830s.
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The industrial revolution in Britain needed raw materials and foods from the Near East, and markets to sell its rapidly expanding range of manufactured products. The route up and down the Danube, across the Black Sea to Constantinople then across central Asia to India, was a third shorter than round the Cape of Good Hope. ‘If in a political point of view the independence of Turkey is of great importance, in a commercial sense it is of no less importance to this country,’ Lord Palmerston told the House of Commons in 1849.
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And for that trade to flourish, the survival and stability of the Ottoman empire appeared the best guarantee. Madder root needed by British industries to dye textiles, valonia to tan leather, wheat and corn to feed Britain's fast-growing population, raw silk and raisins, all came from the Ottoman empire. The grain grew on the rich farmlands of the Danubian plain.

Britain intervened on the Ottoman side in the Crimean War, from 1853 to 1856, to prevent Russian encroachments that threatened her trade routes from the north. The ships carrying letters home from British soldiers travelled up the Danube, alongside other ships carrying grain to feed their wives and sweethearts.
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Each ship issued its own postmark on envelopes, and they are now much prized by collectors. Meanwhile Russia was pressing ever closer to the Danubian principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, on the northern banks of the river, and to what would later become Bulgaria on the southern shore. The tsars presented themselves as the champions of the Balkan Christians. From the 1850s, France also became a supporter of the national independence movements against the Ottomans.

In 1848 Habsburg Austria crushed the revolution and war of independence in Hungary with Russian help, and more than four thousand Hungarians and Poles fled to safety on Ottoman territory. When Vienna and St Petersburg demanded their extradition to face almost certain execution, the British and French sent their fleets to the Dardanelles to protect the Turks from a possible Russian attack. Public sympathy in Britain was firmly on the side of Hungary and her Turkish friends, and against the ‘bullying’ tactics of Austria and Russia. ‘By an ironic twist of history,’ wrote L.S. Stavrianos, ‘Turkey now stood out in the public mind as the
champion of European liberty against the brutal despotism of the two emperors.’
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The peoples of the Balkans, on the other hand, saw Russia as a useful ally to break the Turkish grip on their countries once and for all. In December 1877, Vasile Popov tells me proudly, a threat by the Russian and Bulgarian besiegers to flood the city of Pleven, the modern Plevna just to the south-west of Nikopol, finally forced its Turkish defenders to surrender after a five-month siege.
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While Bulgaria was shaking itself loose of Constantinople, and into conflict with its neighbours about just how big an independent Bulgaria should be, the Romanian-Danubian principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia finally managed to unite, first of all under a home-grown prince, Alexander Cuza, in 1861, then under a foreign one, Charles of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, in 1866. Cuza, though unpopular with the Romanian liberals who had set their hearts on a foreign prince, pushed through an important land reform in 1864 that stripped the monasteries, which owned 11 per cent of all arable land, of their holdings. He also liberated the large, semi-nomadic Roma population from slavery.
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A clock strikes twelve on the wall in Milan Nikolov's office. We stop talking to let it finish. Twelve strokes can take such a long time. The waiting seems appropriate, as we are talking about his own history and that of his people. Both his grandfather and his father were born in Ruse. His family are Calderash Gypsies, coppersmiths, whose work has been sought after for centuries throughout eastern and central Europe. The Calderash are one of the proudest and most traditionally-minded of the Roma tribes.
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Milan is the sixth of seven children, four boys and three girls. Part of his community has assimilated, he says; some have become Muslims or Christians, and many have lost their roots. He still speaks the Roma language and works in the city council to improve his people's lot. He studied agriculture at university, an unusual subject for a man from a community that has been traditionally landless, but has been increasingly drawn to social work since he finished his degree – to deal with the age-old problem of how better to integrate the Roma into society and politics. He was elected as a councillor for the Union of Democratic Forces, a centre-right party that won the 1997 elections, but has largely disintegrated at national level. Rain starts falling heavily outside as we speak, battering the panes, followed by peals of
thunder. The city beyond his windows goes dark, the roofs lit up by brilliant flashes of lightning. I imagine the storm sweeping down through the whole Danubian plain, conducted by the river.