The Danube (4 page)

My wife Andrea first took me down to the river and gave me a home beside it. In the winter of 1991, before the Danube was diverted, we walked late at night beneath willows pure white in the snow and the hoarfrost at Ásványráro.

In Romania Mihai Radu was an indefatigable researcher, translator and driver. In the Danube delta, Radu Suciu introduced me to the sturgeon, and Daniel and Eugen Petrescu, Grigore Baboianu and Adrian Oprisan guided my travels. Todor Avramov saved me when I was stranded at the mouth of the river, and his wife Maria told me stories from her childhood.

The staff of the National History and Archaeology Museum in Constanța, and Marian Neagu of the Museum of the Lower Danube in Călărași were generous with their time. In Sulina Aurel Bajanaru and in Dervent Father Atal deserve special mention. Doru Oniga was an excellent host on several visits to the Iron Gates.

In Bulgaria I would like to thank especially Nikolai Nenov, Eskren Velikov, Milan Nikolov, Momcilo Kolev and Theodora Kopcheva in Ruse, Todor Tsanev in Červena Voda, Nikolai Kirilov and his team and Father Iliya in Lom, and Mitko Natovi and his whole family in Vidin.

In Serbia, Lacka Lakatos and Milorad Batinić drove me through the long reaches of the summer night. After so many wars it was a relief to cover the story of a river in peacetime with them. Andrej Starovic explained the intricacies and controversies of the Vinča culture.

In Hungary, Adam LeBor first suggested the Danube as a theme, the crew of the Tatabánya took me all the way to Esztergom, and Szilárd Sasváry and Gábor Karátson generously shared their knowledge of the river. Viktor Filipenko translated texts from Russian, and Andrea Iván translated the story of Teddy Weyr and my interview with Todor Tsanev from Bulgarian. Onur Yumurtaci of the University of Eskișehir translated the Turkish songs from the Danube delta.

In Austria, I would like to thank in particular Bethany Bell, Lana Šehić, Omar Al-Rawi, Seda Atsaeva and her whole family, Hermann Spannraft and Refik.

Many environmentalists, the whole length of the river, shared their time and knowledge with me. Apart from those mentioned already, I must thank Orieta Hulea, Stela Bozhinova, Tibor Mikuska, Claudia and Arno Mohl, Jaromír Šibl, Philip Weller, Georg Frank, Hannes Seehofer and Siegfried Geissler.

The main maps I used throughout the journey were the excellent four-volume
Bikeline
editions of the Esterbauer publishing house, designed especially for long-distance cyclists. By pretending to be on a bicycle even when I was in a car, I was able to stay within sight and smell of the river for almost the whole journey.

No English writer or traveller in eastern Europe can escape the magnificent legacy of Patrick Leigh Fermor, who passed away in June 2011, as I was in mid-stride on my own journey. Neal Ascherson's
Black Sea
was a great inspiration, and without him the precious Danube snail might never have found refuge between these pages.
The Ottoman Empire
by Patrick Kinross was invaluable as a source on the Turkish period, and I have quoted liberally from his work. I first read
Danube
by Claudio Magris when it was first published in English in 1989. While my own book is very different, I
enjoyed his literary company throughout my journey. For my understanding of the archaeology of the Danube,
The Lost World of Old Europe – The Danube Valley 5000–3500 BC
, edited by David W. Anthony, was a constant reference work, as was the book so many of its authors challenge,
The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe
by Marija Gimbutas. The archaeologist John Chapman kindly corresponded with me to clarify the origins of the spiny oyster shell,
Spondylus gaederopus
. Donald Wesling of San Diego introduced me to ‘The Willows’, the astonishing short story by Algernon Blackwood about the Danube between Hungary and Slovakia. Gary Snyder's writings, from the faraway Sierra Nevada in northern California, have been a precious reminder since my youth of the power and importance of wilderness.

In Britain, I would like to thank especially Robert Baldock of Yale University Press for his unstinting support, and also at Yale, Steve Kent, Tami Halliday, Samantha Cross and Candida Brazil. My agent Sara Menguc enthusiastically backed the project from the start. Loulou Brown painstakingly copy-edited the book.

Many friends walked under the willows over the years, encouraging me to write: Gerard Casey and Louise de Bruin, Roger Norman, Simon Pilpel, Jim Oppé, Bill Brockway, Nicola Balfour, Steve Johnstone, Frances Land, Stephen Batty, Frances Hatch, Art Hewitt, Charlie Foster-Hall, Nikola Leudolph and Mark Frankland. At the BBC, among many friends and colleagues, Tony Grant, the editor of
From Our Own Correspondent
was a tower of strength and enthusiasm.

Finally, I would like to thank my mother Janet, my sister Mish, my brother Dom, and last but not least my friend and faithful champion Xandra Bingley.

INTRODUCTION

The Lips of the Danube

H
ISTRIA
. A thin column of smoke leans inland from its roots among the reeds. The sharp north-easterly breeze brings tears to my eyes. There's a flicker of flame; I can just see the heads of two men above the reeds, beside their fire. Two small fishing boats pass northwards up the coast, like racehorses, side by side. Their bows cut the rough grey surf. There are twin figures in the stern, one in the bow. Are the men by the fire fishermen,
come ashore to cook, or reed cutters, who have reached the end of the world? Has the mariner built his last or his first desolate fire on this coast?

Here on the fraying fringes of Europe, between the Greek and Roman ruins of Histria and the rising waters of the Black Sea, I begin my journey up the River Danube. Suddenly an explosion splits the fabric of the morning. We crouch for shelter, but find none among the ruins. The roar rolls slowly round the rim of the horizon. The Persians, under Darius the Great? The Iranians under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? The Romanian coast is only two hours’ flying time from Baghdad or Tehran. But it is only the Romanian navy, or their close allies the Americans, testing the firepower of their frigates far out at sea. The ruins take no notice. These walls were overrun for fourteen hundred years. Histria was established by Greek colonists from Miletus in time for the Olympic Games in the mid-seventh century
BC
, and abandoned in
AD
700, when silt from the southernmost lip of the Danube turned its sheltered bay into an inland lake.

To travel the Danube upriver, from the Black Sea to the Black Forest, I must first explore the hinterland of Dobrogea – the ‘good land’, according to one etymology
⁴
– between the Danube and the Black Sea coast. In the National History and Archaeology Museum at Constanța, forty-five kilometres down the coast from Histria, stands a coiled snake made from purple marble, its head erect. Known as Glykon, the sweet one, a Roman god of healing, the snake has the face of a lamb, the ears of a man, and the tail of a lion, signifying gentleness, attentiveness and courage. It was found during excavations beneath the old railway station in the city in 1962, with thirteen other gods, most probably deliberately hidden to save them from the Christians, with their passion for destroying pagan images. Did the owners expect the Christians to pass like a sudden squall, after which the snake could re-emerge, unscathed? At the start of this journey up the Danube, the serpent is for me the river herself, a single body, green, brown, white, yellow, grey, blue, silver and black, her moods and her surface colours constantly changing.

Up
the Danube? Many people I met on this long journey thought I must be mad to attempt the river the wrong way. I clung on for dear life in the stern of Adrian Oprisan's small fibreglass dinghy, riding the waves at Sulina in the Danube delta; I battled on my bicycle along the dyke into a fresh north-westerly wind near Mohács in southern Hungary, as
immaculately dressed Swiss and English cyclists glided effortlessly past me in the other direction, their mouths wide open in amazement, catching the fruit-flies of late summer; and finally I chased the tail of the Danube in my car, snaking away among suburban German hills.

Rivers follow a certain inevitable course from the mountains to the sea. Intrepid travel-book writers emerge from coffee shops in Furtwangen and Donaueschingen, gorged on Black Forest gateaux, to follow the same route downstream, with growing apprehension as they reach less and less familiar lands. But what do east Europeans think, in their palaces and hovels by the river, in towns whose names few geography teachers in Bonn or Brighton, Basel or Barcelona, ever utter? In Brǎila or in Cǎlǎraşi, in Smederevo or Baja? And what of the steady procession of migrants and traders, soldiers and adventurers who travelled in my direction,
up
the Danube, in search of a better life. What was on their minds and in their satchels? And what did they leave behind?

Only for a brief period, from 1740 to 1790, did the Swabians of Ulm board their
Kuppe
– simple wooden boats with long rudders, powered by oars – and head downriver to resettle lands in Hungary laid waste by war and disease. And even they would probably have stayed at home had it not been for the persuasive charm of the Habsburg empress Maria Theresa.

With all due respect to the noble efforts of past writers, I feel I can offer something different. After half a lifetime living in eastern Europe, it seems high time for a journey westwards, upriver, to cast new light on the continent as people coming from the east see it, rising early in the morning, following their own shadows. One man, at least, understood my journey. Ilie Sidurenko, a retired fisherman in the village of Sfântu Gheorghe, on the southernmost tip of the Danube, roared with approval when I told him my plan. ‘You will be like the sturgeon!’ he laughed. Heading upriver to spawn.

As I travelled, I became aware of the Danube's contribution to Europe, in the sense that it carved a path, or laid a trail, for people to follow westwards. Europe was populated and ‘civilised’ from the east. Around 6200
BC
, farmers from Anatolia settled in south-eastern Europe, bringing with them cows and sheep, goats and seeds. Analysis of the genetic structure of milk traces found on shards of Neolithic pottery shows that their cows mated with aurochs, the wild bulls of the European continent.
⁵
The settlers brought with them a knowledge of metallurgy. They built kilns that reached a
temperature of 1,100 degrees Celsius to smelt copper from the greenish-brown rocks of the northern Balkans at Rudna Glava in Serbia and Ai Bunar in Bulgaria. From this new material of such dazzling beauty they fashioned exquisite jewellery, tools and weapons.
⁶
These were traded far and wide, and the longer the river, the greater the reach. Not much later, gold was extracted from rich seams, or washed from the tributaries of the Danube.

Between 5000 and 3500
BC
, large villages or towns grew up across south-eastern Europe, especially between the Danube and Dnieper rivers. The largest, at Majdanetskoe and Tal'janki, boasted 2,700 households and around 10,000 inhabitants, five hundred years before the foundation of the Sumerian city states between the Tigris and the Euphrates.
⁷
This was at a time when most other inhabitants of mainland Europe were clustered in small clans, chewing on bones in dank caves. Such towns or large villages grew physically higher from the surrounding countryside into tells or raised cities, as successive generations built on the ruins beneath them. This cluster of independent cultures, known to archaeologists as Tripol'ye-Cucuteni, Hamangia, Gumelnița, Karanovo and Vinča, established the European continent's first long-distance trade in beautiful pinkish-white spiny oyster shells,
Spondylus gaederopus
.
⁸
The translucent shells did not just reflect the light; they seemed to carry it within themselves, catching and storing the moonlight across the Aegean Sea where they were gathered. This was in vivid contrast to the dark, graceful pots with intricate lines, the animal-headed lids and handles of the same cultures. The
Spondylus
shells were buried with their owners, both male and female, as sacred objects to smooth the difficult journey to the next world. Salt was as important to the peoples of the region as the ornaments and tools they used. The white gold quarried from the mines near Tuzla in Bosnia, Varna in Bulgaria, Turda in Transylvania and Hallstatt in Austria enabled them to preserve and trade over vast distances the meat and fish they hunted.
⁹

These civilisations were named ‘Old Europe’ by the American-Lithuanian archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, and the name still seems more appropriate than the ‘New Europe’ label attached to eastern Europe by American statesmen and British comedians. Many thousands of miniature clay figurines, mostly female, with lines and spirals drawn on their bodies, have been found throughout the Lower and Middle Danube region. Marija Gimbutas has argued that these represent proof of the spiritual and social
power of women, and named the groups ‘councils of the goddess’, evidence of a matriarchal society.
¹⁰
More recently, archaeologists have argued that they were mere playthings, household objects which tell us more about their owners’ fashion-sense than their beliefs.
¹¹