The Danube (32 page)

The climax of the trip to Vukovar in January 1999 was a flight in a military helicopter over the region, including the Kopački Rit wetland forest. I remember the cold, the roar of the engines, the experiments I made, shouting into my microphone, to try to record something in broadcast quality, and the view – the vast expanse of frozen forest, brown and black on the white frost and ice.

In June 2012 I travelled through Kopački Rit again, a little closer to the water this time, paddling a canoe, on a trip organised by the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF). For the first and only time on this journey upriver, I allowed myself to be carried downriver on the current.
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On the WWF flood-plain map, thick yellow, brown and blue lines have been drawn on a satellite map of the Hungarian, Croatian and Serbian borderland area, through which the broad Danube and its tributary the Drava river flow. The yellow lines either side of the river show the historical floodplains, 211,000 hectares wide, and include the Serbian town of Apatin, and parts
of Mohács and Baja in Hungary. The area between the brown lines is like a strip either side of the Danube, much narrower than the first – the areas affected by recent floods – down to 53,000 hectares. The dark blue line indicates the meandering course of the Danube itself, and the shape of the Kopački Rit wetlands, like the outline of a seated goddess. The Croatian and Serbian governments plan to regulate another 115 kilometres of the Danube and the Drava rivers, reinforcing the banks with stones and cutting off the remaining meanders to guarantee a sufficient depth for shipping all year round. The WWF and local environmental groups argue that the ships should be adapted to the river, not the river to the ships, and that with the benefit of modern communications technology it should be possible to keep the relatively small volume of traffic on the Danube flowing, without recourse to more dams or more river regulations.

The monument to the Soviet liberators on the outcrop of rock overlooking the Danube at Batina is thirty-five metres high – a woman cast in bronze, holding in her outstretched left arm a red star. If you stand far enough away, you can see that the star is made of thick red glass. Around the base of the monument are dramatic frescoes portraying the desperate attempt of Ukrainian soldiers to cross the Danube by boat in November 1944, under constant fire from the German unit dug in on this hilltop. The Red Army had just captured Belgrade and was pushing north towards Hungary. In one frieze, a Soviet soldier is swimming alongside a landing craft in the icy waves, while his comrades stand upright firing their machine guns. With huge loss of life – at least two thousand dead – the Ukrainians succeeded in establishing a bridgehead in the wine cellars at the foot of the hill. The German defenders were only overcome when the Soviets brought up their own heavy artillery and delayed their river crossing for twenty-four hours while they pounded the hilltop. There's a recent wreath at the foot of the monument, in the blue and yellow colours of the Ukrainian flag. In the base of the monument 1,287 Red Army soldiers are buried. The Danube banks are thickly wooded on either side. On the far bank is Serbia, on the nearside, the red roofs of Batina. A red steel bridge connects the two countries. A German barge, the
Panther
, registered in Hamburg, passes, low in the water. Through binoculars, I watch the man in the bow, busy coiling a long, green rope. He doesn't look up. Coming upriver, a passenger cruiser, the
A'Rosa Riva
, has an enormous red rose painted on her
white hull. I can see the outline of people, stretched out in their deckchairs, getting used to the slow pace of river life.

Ten thousand years ago the main stream of the Danube was further east, down where the Tisza now flows. In the seventeenth century, all the land between the Drava confluence with the Danube and Mohács in southern Hungary was owned by Prince Eugen of Savoy – given him by the grateful Habsburg emperors for his military successes against the Turks. The forests became game reserves, rich in wild boar and deer, jealously guarded by their aristocratic owners, and after the Second World War by the new communist elite. Tito himself came here to hunt with his friends. At that time the forests were administered by the Forestry and Hunting authorities of the regional councils, strictly under Communist Party control. Since the return of democracy, environmental pressure groups and the national park authority compete with the hunters and foresters. ‘They have to realise,’ said Tibor Mikuska, of the Croatian Society for the Protection of Birds and Nature, ‘that now they have to move over, and make way for the nature conservers.’
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The border itself is a new problem. As Croatia joins the European Union in 2013, while Serbia stays out for a few more years, it will be Croatia's task to reinforce this section of the twenty-eight-member bloc's new external border. The obvious technical solution would be to beef up both banks. ‘That would be a disaster,’ says Tibor. The more ecologically friendly solution, he suggests, would be for the border to be managed jointly by Serbs and Croats, and the Danube allowed to continue to peacefully meander between them, sometimes higher, sometimes lower, but not tied into a straitjacket which would have fatal consequences for the fish and for the rare birds that nest along this pristine section.

The next morning we drive along fragile, dusty embankments to reach the shore, just downriver from Batina. I share a canoe with Arno Mohl, a conservation expert of WWF Austria. At the core of the dispute he says, as we paddle idly downstream close to the Croatian bank, is a clash between two philosophies of flood management. ‘It is widely accepted in western Europe that the best flood protection is a wide floodplain, to absorb the rising waters, as still happens in Kopački Rit. Croatian and Serbian engineers still believe that the only way to deal with floods is to build up both banks with vast quantities of rock.’

A white eagle, one of only twelve pairs surviving in Kopački Rit, arches majestically over the Danube. Its wing span is so great, its head and even its white tail seem minuscule in flight, like afterthoughts to a design focused only on perfecting the wings. The upper branches of the poplars we pass are bare, killed off by the droppings from the cormorants that perch there preening themselves, watching out for fish in the waters below. The sandy island in midstream we planned to picnic on is nowhere to be seen – just the tops of the bushes which grow on it. So we paddle on through the afternoon. The
Panther
, the German-registered boat we saw the previous day from Batina, passes downstream – she must have moored below Batina for the night. Willow trees can last three hundred days in a flooded forest, oaks barely sixty. The banks are thick with willows, with the water rising well up their trunks. There is also a mix of other, non-indigenous species: Canadian poplars and maples. On the far side a barge, the
Sveti Dimitar
, registered at Lom in Bulgaria, passes downstream, its engine rumbling and rattling into the distance, drowning out the roar of birdsong.

Arno and I compare the fate of the countries beside the Danube. Austria owed much of her economic prosperity after the Second World War to her damming of rivers for hydro-power, I suggest. Are you not now trying to deny Croatians and Serbs the prosperity you in Austria enjoy?

‘We deeply question the economic benefits of these massive interventions. The floodplain forest is suitable for sustainable forestry. Beneath it there is a huge ground water resource full of valuable drinking water. There is a wealth of fish species, so important for those living from fish, and this is also an important area for eco-tourism. People come here from all over the world to see a place which escaped the destruction of forests elsewhere in Europe. The question is: will this unique area be turned into a man-made landscape, or will it be preserved as a jewel to be used in an economical, sustainable way?’

After several hours paddling we turn right, off the main Danube, into a side arm which feeds the wetland forest. The water flows more slowly here, and there is a different atmosphere to the main stream. Everything is more secretive, as if nature is listening to her own body, with its giggles and gurgles. A kingfisher flies along the shore, a vivid flash of turquoise blue. Tiny snails have climbed the stalks of grass and reeds to escape the rising water. By now it is receding, but they have not yet been informed. There
are shadowy recesses under the willows which bend low over the river bank. The journey is only fifteen kilometres, but feels longer in the heat.

At four-thirty the next morning I set out with Tibor and two German colleagues to photograph birds. Willows dot the wide, flooded plain. Purple herons stand sentinel on top of cylinders of newly bailed hay. Two white-tailed eagles watch from the top branches – the female bird higher and larger than the male. Two families of wild boar swim through the marshes, followed by a lone, nervous red deer. Yellow flowers grow out of the marshland, brilliant against the dark trunks of the willows. Reeds form a green carpet, swaying in the breeze. Clumps of yellow-green mistletoe stand out against the darker green foliage. In the distance, through binoculars, I watch a black stork, rarer and shyer than the white storks that make their nests on poles and chimneys in the villages. The southern part of Kopački Rit has been a protected area since 1967. ‘The wettest period is usually in May, and the driest in September and October, before the autumn rains,’ says Tibor, who grew up in the nearby village of Kopačevo. ‘About 70 per cent of the floodplain area here was lost to agriculture or construction, but there has been no major forestry here since 1967, and no hunting since 1991 … The lucky thing is that humans are spoilt! It is either too humid, too hot or too cold. Or there are too many mosquitoes. We bring visitors to experience the wilderness, but after an hour they usually want to return to civilisation!’ So the wilderness is not overloaded with eco-tourists.

There are discreet wooden platforms and guided boat trips out on to the lakes. We turn off the dyke to visit a colony of grey herons, high in the poplars. The air is full of the impatient clacking of the chicks in the nests, and the loud squawks of their parents, gliding gracefully over the trees, bringing them food. The shadows of the birds pass over the leaves, before the great birds themselves appear. A single white feather from an egret floats slowly down from a nest, twisting in the early sunlight. This is the largest grey heron colony in Croatia – 770 pairs. ‘I know because I counted them!’ says Tibor. The female birds lay four to six eggs, out of which two to three fledglings hatch. In a bad year, when it rains during hatching time, only one chick survives, because the eggs get chilled, or the chicks catch cold. The grey heron population is growing in Europe, nevertheless, and the birds are getting bolder. Traditionally they ate mostly fish, but now
they eat rodents as well, and like seagulls feed more and more on rubbish dumps. ‘It is the fate of all wetlands to dry out, as part of the natural silting up process. In two to three thousand years, this will become a forest. What the regulation work would do is to accelerate that process into a few decades.’ Golden orioles call sweetly from the undergrowth, where reed warblers and green finches reside. As the sun rises higher in the yardarm of the trees the mutter of frogs turns into a roar, and we flee the wilderness in search of breakfast.

The road to the site of the battle of Mohács leads down avenues of horse chestnuts. A domed hall with its exhibition of posters is just being completed. The monument itself is simple and touching compared to the martial glories of the Romans and Serbs further downstream. The centrepiece is a low, circular mound containing the remains of the eighteen thousand Hungarian soldiers who died that day. ‘The greatest defeat since Mohács,’ a glum taxi-driver once told me, when the Soviet Union beat Hungary 6-1 in the opening match of the 1986 World Cup. Mohács haunts the Hungarian imagination, just as Trianon does, the 1920 treaty that divided the country up, after its defeat, with Austria and Germany, in the First World War.

The mound is laid out with bushes with blood-red leaves. All around are Hungarian
kopjafák
, carved wooden posts traditionally placed on the graves of Hungarians to symbolise the personal characteristics of the dead person. At Mohács the posts are adorned with spirals and curves. All are beautiful in their way, and recall Brâncuşi's Endless Column. But while the Romanian artist was seeking to reach the heavens, these are designed to ground the memory of the warriors in the earth. Suleiman himself, carved at the entrance, has a red diamond mounted on the crest of his turban, and dangling metal earrings. For a moment it seems a rather sympathetic portrayal of the arch-enemy of the Hungarians, until I notice the bag of wooden heads, dangling from a net around the base of the statue. Opposite him, the youthful Lajos II, the twenty-year-old Hungarian king, stands defiant, in brown tunic and blue belt, holding a small shield in his right hand. Pál Tömöri is there too, Archbishop of Kalocsa, further up the Danube, the commander of the Hungarian troops in southern Hungary, a grave figure with a long beard, and a blue eagle mounted on his yellow
belt. Lola, a former Bosnian Serb soldier, is moved by the scene. As a former fighter against the Muslims, he feels at home on the battlefield.

The final message of the exhibition is reconciliation, in the words of the Hungarian poet, Attila József.

After the defeat at Mohács, King Lajos drowned in the Csele stream nearby, weighed down by his armour after being thrown from his horse. Suleiman stayed with his troops on the battlefield for several days, expecting the arrival of the main Hungarian army. He could not believe that this once great nation, the main foe of his empire, could put so few armed men into the field. At that time Hungary was divided, with a third under Ottoman occupation, a third held by the Habsburgs, led by Ferdinand, their candidate for the now vacant throne, and a third, Transylvania, a vassal state of the Ottomans, but enjoying considerable freedom. For the next 150 years, Hungary became an almost constant battleground between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans. The country has never regained its greatness, though it has often tried. The blue, rather chubby, features of King Mátthias, Lajos's grandfather and the last great king of Hungary who died in 1490, gaze up from the one thousand forint Hungarian banknote. His own ‘black army’, the
Fekete Sereg
was disbanded by the country's nobles after the king's death, as an obstacle to their own greed.
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