The Danube (26 page)

On the Danube shore, I talk to a man herding a few cows along the road. Aleksa Jorsa is sixty-five and used to drive sixteen tonne trucks, carrying coal down to the harbour in Tisovița, now lost beneath the waves. ‘I was born by the Danube, but we were not allowed to swim in it because of the border. The shore was like a no-man's-land; we could see it, but not get close to it.’ The river often froze over before the dam was built, but not any more. In the old days, the army blew up the ice to get the floes running again, as at Nikopol. He misses Ada Kaleh, which he used to admire across the water, but only went there once, when he was aged nine or ten, on a school trip. He remembers the candies best, the nuts and sweets. Everyone was sorry when the island was destroyed, along with grazing land his family owned beside the river. Nonetheless he is nostalgic for the communist years because everyone had work. Now he supports his daughter and her two children on his pension alone. This is a beautiful place, he agrees, but all the youngsters leave because there is little chance of finding work.

Electricity pylons, painted yellow and black, cluster near the Iron Gates dam like football supporters, impatient to get into the stadium before the
match. A group of German bikers queues to have their photographs taken in front of a ‘no photography’ sign, and are moved on by angry policemen, incensed by ridicule of the power of the state. The dam itself has twelve gates, flanked by massive concrete walls. It is a structure of which the Romans would have been proud, and reminds me that I am a barbarian at heart. There is little traffic over the top. The Serbian customs post on the far side is decorated with two ‘Wanted’ posters – the grinning, clean-shaven features of the Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladić and the bearded, brooding face of Goran Hadžić, indicted for the killing of 271 hospital inmates in Vukovar in 1991.
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The Ottoman fortress of Fetislam lies right on the Danube shore, a little outside Kladovo. Several fishermen have spread their nets and their ragged shirts to dry between the crumbling arches. They have unrolled mattresses in what must once have been the guardrooms and live like Gypsies for months at a time, selling their catch, and saving money to take home. Lime trees and mulberry bushes push up between the ruins. From the battlements of the fortress I can just make out the ruins of Trajan's bridge on the far side.
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What was once the most important and imposing structure of the whole region is now dwarfed by giant grain silos, cranes, cruiseboats, and the ragged skyline of Turnu Severin. ‘How sad,’ wrote the German traveller Helmuth von Moltke in the 1830s, ‘that the Roman bridges have not survived. I believe that below Regensburg, not a single stone bridge crosses the river, below Vienna no strong bridge, and beneath Peterwardein (Novi Sad) not a single bridge of any description. This bridge (at Kladovo) would have been the only permanent crossing point for three hundred miles, if it had not been destroyed by those who built it, to protect themselves from the Goths.’
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The museum at Kladovo is divided into two sections: Roman and Prehistoric. There are chunky, hexagonal floor bricks, the rusting blades of Roman and barbarian swords, a frieze of Trajan and his men on the Danube shore in front of their fine bridge, and an image of the god Mithras in white marble, with a cruel mouth and what looks like shaving foam bubbling out of his head. There is also a frieze of the ritual slaughter of a bull – part of the initiation rites of the followers of Mithras.
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The other half of the museum contains replicas of the astonishing fish-gods or goddesses of Lepenski Vir, forty kilometres upriver. When the decision was
taken to build the dam, archaeologists were given three years to find what they could before the precious sites along the banks disappeared beneath the flood waters. From 1965 to 1969, the Serbian archaeologist Dragoslav Srejović excavated several Mesolithic settlements. His most amazing discoveries were at Lepenski Vir.
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Fifty-four huge, egg-shaped stones, with half-human, half fish-like faces were found on terraces above the river. Most were placed among the foundations of trapezoid dwellings – guardians of the hearth, facing the doorway and the river. The floors of the houses were made of violet-red stone, fragmented into triangular tiles. Each of the heads has a stern face, their mouth turned down at the edges, as though by the strain of the current of the river, and large, bulbous eyes. Srejović named them Danubius, the Family Founder, the Forefather, the Fairyman. Marija Gimbutas saw in the symbols engraved around the faces, the zig-zags, chevrons and labyrinths, evidence of goddesses rather than of gods, of fish-women and ancestresses.
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Others have non-human features – ‘the Deer in the Wood’, ‘Last Sight’ and ‘Chronos’.

Whoever the people who once lived here were, the settlement shows little sign of attack or defence. The same village seems to have existed here for three thousand years, its inhabitants living peacefully on fish and game. A huge cliff face, known as the Big Rock, faces it across the Danube. Only at the very end, around 3500
BC
, are there signs of destruction by fire. There are other peculiarities. The bodies of newborn children were buried beneath the floors of the houses. Adults were buried with their bodies oriented to the flow of the Danube, their heads pointing downstream. Srejović's fellow archaeologist Ljubinka Babović describes Lepenski Vir as a place of worship, divided into night and day sanctuaries, a Stonehenge of the Danube.
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A northerly wind blows off the Danube, making the mid-summer heat in Kladovo more bearable. Boys run down to the water with the huge, inflated inner tubes of tractor tyres, and plunge into the water after them – diving platforms, or bouncy castles. Their older brothers keep their distance, waist deep in the water, concentrating on the more serious business of catching fish, their long lines cast far out into the stream. Just down from the dam, this is the last place on my journey where sturgeon can still be found in the river. The former caviar factory in Kladovo is defunct. There
are actually two dams, Iron Gates I and II. Kladovo is near the top of the storage lake created by Iron Gates II, which opened in 1984 – an eighty-kilometre long stretch of near-stagnant water, except when the great locks are opened at either end. My son Matthew has joined me for this stretch of the journey, and I try out his skateboard on the walkway beside the river. The wheels make a loud noise on the tarmac. At least I can now add the humble skateboard to the list of means of transport I have used, travelling up along the shoulders of the old Danube.

On the shore at Kladovo is a simple stone monument to Jewish refugees from central Europe, to whom the town offered shelter in the spring of 1940. ‘In this place from January to September 1940 the only safe harbour existed for one thousand Austrian and Central European Jews, on their way to the Holy Land – all victims of the Nazis,’ reads a bronze plaque. They had set out from Bratislava on boats down the Danube, trying to reach the Black Sea, then cross through the Bosphorus and the eastern Mediterranean to Palestine. When the authorities prevented them from continuing their journey, the Federation of Jewish Communities found extra boats for them to stay in, moored to the shore in Kladovo. Eventually 207 immigration certificates were issued for Palestine, for young people aged fifteen to seventeen. They were able to continue their journey by train, through Yugoslavia, Greece, Turkey, Syria and Lebanon, in March 1941.
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The following month the Germans occupied Yugoslavia, and all the others were killed in, or on the way to, concentration camps. There was just one survivor. In the autumn of 1944, as the Soviet Black Sea fleet sailed up the Danube, the retreating Germans sank all 130 of their naval ships in lines across the Danube, to slow the Soviet advance.
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Most were removed, but one appeared from the depths in the summer of 2003, during the same drought which caused such problems at the Cernavodǎ nuclear power station in Romania.
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On the car radio, the Serbian singer Djordje Balašević is singing a ballad about the break-up of Yugoslavia. ‘We don't look each other in the eyes any more,’ he croons, ‘we just look at one another's car registration-plates.’
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The letters displayed used to indicate exactly where the car was registered, and as republic after republic slipped into war in the 1990s, this information could be a matter of life and death, letting you know if those coming at speed towards you were likely to be friend or foe. The post-war
number plates in Bosnia were carefully designed to be neutral so that it was impossible to guess where the vehicle came from.

In Mosna, a tiny hamlet on the creek where the Porečka flows into the Danube, Vitomir Marković tells the story of how one famous local veteran of the partisan struggle in the Second World War refused to leave his home as the waters rose after the building of the dam. He climbed on to his roof with his twelve children and raised the Yugoslav flag. The problem was all the more delicate for the authorities as Marshal Tito himself had been his
kum
, the best man at his wedding. ‘After two days, they persuaded them all to come down, into a boat,’ Vitomir remembers. ‘They were given a big new house in Donji Milanovac. Nothing was too much for them.’ Vitomir came to the area in 1962 as town clerk, and has stayed ever since. He has an album of black-and-white photographs, including one of himself in the early 1960s, with six other men and four children, posing with a huge beluga sturgeon, as long as a man, on the grass in front of them.

The Danube is silver green here, almost velvet in texture, and the wooded slopes reach right down to the water. Early the next morning as I swim in the Porečka a fairy mist hovers just over the surface. Smoke rises from the woods – the sign of charcoal burners at work. A German yacht, nine metres long with a family on board, is moored in the creek, its mast stepped. They are long-distance travellers like myself, and there's a bicycle secured in the bow. We drive up a road of zig-zag bends to Miroč, high on the hill overlooking the Danube. On the far bank there are glimpses of the two surviving towers of Cetații Tricole standing out of the water. Pink dog -roses and bright yellow rattle decorate the roadsides. The road plunges deeper into dense forests, and it is hard to believe that it will ever reach the village. But at last it does, and we sit down to drink coffee in the main square. It's Saturday morning, and what looks like a wedding tent is being put up behind the village restaurant. It is no wedding, however, but the rare visit of one of the sons of the village who has made good in the wide world and is now staging a gathering of all his friends and family from far and wide.

I wanted to come to Miroč to hear the story of the legendary Serbian hero Marko Kraljević. Casual questioning of the people milling around the square leads me to Momir Plavi, a forest worker. He knows the story best. We stand in the shade of the ‘wedding tent’ and he begins his tale.
‘Marko Kraljević and Miloš Obilić were good friends, and were drinking together one night here in the village inn. Now Miloš liked to drink a lot of wine, and when he began to drink he always began to sing. “Don't sing so loud,” Marko said to Miloš, “because the fairies will hear you and they will get angry.” But Miloš wouldn't listen, and, soon enough, the furious fairies arrived and struck Miloš dead. Marko saw what happened, and jumped on his legendary horse, Sarac – meaning dappled – to chase after the fairy who had killed his friend. At long last he caught her, and forced her to gather mountain herbs and make a concoction to heal his friend's wounds. And that is how Marko Kraljević brought Miloš back to life.’ According to another version of the same story, Marko talks Miloš into singing as they ride their horses over Miroč mountain, against his better judgement – he well knows the
Vila
(fairy) Ravijojla will be jealous of his beautiful voice. But Marko persuades him, Miloš starts singing, then Marko falls asleep in the saddle and the fairy starts singing along with him – and kills him out of jealousy. Both versions end in the same way with Miloš restored to life.
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‘Do you know what herbs she used?’ I ask Momir. He lists four or five, but the only name I recognise and can find later in my
Dictionary of Weeds of Eastern Europe
, is
kantarion
, common St John's wort.
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The others names include words which sound like
itricaz
and
podubica
.

‘Are there still fairies in these hills?’ I ask Momir.

‘No! The real fairies have all gone, only fake ones remain.’

‘Why did they leave?’

‘Long ago they lived here and ruled this part of the land. No one knows why one day they went away.’ Afterwards he adds in hushed tones – as the square is filling up, ready for the afternoon's festivities – that they ‘may still be here somewhere, but they don't show themselves any more’.

‘Did you ever see them yourself?’

‘Just once,’ he affirms, ‘in a dream. They were dancing round and round in an opening in the forest. And do you know what?’ He pauses for effect. ‘They were all wearing beautiful blue dresses – just like Gypsy girls!’

On our way down the labyrinthine slope we visit the brick hives of the charcoal-burners. I've seen them before, in Greece and in Hungary, where the beechwood pile is designed to burn right through. Here they have permanent structures of brick, in the same, beehive shape. The
charcoal-burners themselves are absent, but an enormous ferocious dog appears from nowhere and starts bounding towards us, as if in slow motion. At the last moment the rope tied to his collar pulls him back.

Fifteen kilometres from the mouth of the Porečka, the Lepenski Vir site has been recreated above the water level, under a huge steel and glass hangar. The dome overhead gives it a slightly Disneyland feeling, but the walk there is pleasant, across a meadow ringed by beautifully restored whitewashed houses and through a wood. The houses were moved here from their original site on Poreč Island, which, like Ada Kaleh, was lost under the waters of the dam. ‘What was special about Lepenski Vir was that people lived here without interruption for two thousand years,’ says Dragan Provolović, the man in charge. Their view across the Danube must have been similar to the one today, of the remarkable outcrop of stone opposite, known as the Big Rock. While the people in most prehistoric societies lived in houses of the same size, with no apparent social difference, here some houses stand out from the others. Young men work barefoot and shirtless on the site in the heat, carefully placing each stone exactly as it was found. As an attempt to make archaeology accessible to mass tourism, it is bold. But I would rather look at the photographs in the books, gaze on the faces of the fish-gods in the museum, and walk along the shore to get back into the mind of those who once lived here. ‘Danubius’ himself, his yellow sandstone head contrasting with the reddish-grey stone of the earth where he now rests, looks out over the whole site. Even his mouth seems to be drooping more than usual.