Blue Danube to Black Sea Day 9: A Fortress in the Sky

Sunday 2 June
We sail into the port of Vidin on the right (Bulgarian) bank of the river. An impressive new road-rail bridge across the Danube linking Bulgaria to Romania was completed in 2013. It replaced the car-ferry which could not reliably run either in cold winters because of ice, or in dry summers because of lowered water levels. At such times, road traffic would need to detour through Rousse 190 miles downstream to take the only other Danube crossing, the "Friendship Bridge" connecting the two countries. On the lower Danube, all distances are huge by western European standards, whether it's to travel up and down along the river banks or to get across this mighty river.

We set out for the little town of Belogradchik in the foothills of the Balkans. Our guide this time is a woman who is not only Anglophile but has a distinctly British love of irony and word-play. Once again we hear the take of a native Bulgarian on the history of her country. But she is more outspoken than her predecessors in the countries we’ve visited. As we leave Vidin she points out the effects communism has had on her town. Once upon a time, she says, this was a jewel of the Lower Danube, a stylish, beautiful riverside resort full of churches and mosques, narrow streets and fine houses, a place that encapsulated the best of the river’s rich, complex history from antiquity and the Christian Middle Ages through the Ottoman centuries to the Victorian age of elegance. One book I’ve read says it was once a magical town on the Danube where you first caught a whiff of the Orient. “Now look at it!” she scorns as we drive past an unending sequence of derelict socialist-realism factories, office buildings and apartment blocks. Is there anything more depressing in the repertoire of human assault on a townscape than concrete that has been abandoned? “If you want to know why we hate communism so much, just visit Vidin.”

We leave it behind us and head for the blue uplands on the horizon. Rust-and-concrete grey gives way to lush greens. The cumulus is towering ominously. The road is torturous but well engineered, and our driver is skilful. Your first view of Belogradchik is across a deep forested valley. “There’s only one building in this town not to like” announces our guide, “and that’s the socialist telephone exchange”. But we don’t pay much attention to this charmless building so out of scale with the intimate architecture of this town. What holds the attention from miles away is the extraordinary acropolis that sits at the very top of this hilltop town. A vast citadel built among red sandstone crags that tower above the fortifications like giants’ teeth. It’s an unforgettable apparition.

However, the sky is darkening ominously. “I pray that God will preserve us from light (sic) and thunder this afternoon” she warns, all irony gone. “There is iron in these rocks. If an electrical storm happens, and hopefully it won’t, keep away from them for safety’s sake.” Through the medieval gateway, we see a path snaking up a series of steps to another gateway high up, then more steps to the crags at the very top. This adventure is not for everybody. But even from the entrance you can take in the magnificent spectacle of fortifications that are probably unique in Europe.

Known by the Ottomans as Kaleto ("the fortress"), the citadel was created in Roman times as a defensive structure to control the Danube plain at the northern edge of empire. It was remodelled in Ottoman times, and a splendid curtain wall added. We climb up and reach the middle gateway. The sky ahead behind the towering rocky pinnacles is getting darker by the minute. But this is not a time for faint-heartedness. We strike out again, onwards and upwards until we reach the summit. From here there is a magnificent 360 degree panorama over the mountains to the south and the lowlands to the north, with the town (and telephone exchange) as foreground. But most spectacular of all is the sky to southward, blue-black, brilliantly setting off the red rocks rearing up all around us. It’s a photographer’s dream, this dramatic sky that so perfectly echoes the dramatic landscape.

But there is lightning in those clouds, and the first oily drops of rain. We need to get off these rocks quickly. But like the summit of Everest, traffic in both directions has to pass through a gully where the steps are steep and narrow and only one person can get through at a time. Some of our companions are not as fleet of foot as we (still) are, so there is a queue to get off the acropolis, not a long one but enough to concentrate the mind as the storm begins. Meanwhile a party of schoolchildren is on its way up. They crowd inside the upper gate for shelter just as I reach the lower bastion, and the heavens open.

The drive back to Vidin is eventful for the number of heavy trucks that have appeared on the road, heading towards Sofia. It is narrow and sinewy and the risks taken by some of these drivers anxious to make progress are worrying. We round a bend and there directly in front of us is one big truck overtaking another. A head-on collision is averted but it’s a nasty moment. But there’s a good moment later on. Our guide spots a stork in its nest at the top of a pole guarding its young. We stop and enjoy the sight for a full five minutes, a simple pleasure that is touching for its sweetness.

Back in Vidin, we drive round the city. Our guide continues her architectural survey of the depredations of communism on her native town while picking out surviving buildings of beauty such as three houses from the Ottoman era, one of which has been lovingly restored by its owner. We walk to the medieval bastion, the Baba Vida fortress that guards the river upstream of the town. Its mighty curtain walls and towers testify to the threat posed to western Bulgaria by Serbia in the late middle ages. The nearby synagogue is singled out for comment. This fine large late nineteenth century building is ruinous now - emigration to Palestine after the war largely emptied Vidin of its Jews. But our guide tells us proudly that Bulgaria was the only state in Eastern Europe that did not hand its Jews over to the Nazis to be deported and murdered. I find out later that this statement, while true, needs qualification. As an Axis power, Bulgaria was forced to collaborate with the deportation and murder of non-Bulgarian Jews resident in the country. However in 1943, a public outcry supported by both King and Church led to Jewish deportations being halted before any Bulgarian Jews had been transferred to the Germans. This only became generally known after the end of communism in 1989. It's a very different story from Romania and Hungary.

While everyone else gets back on board ship, I wander round the town centre alone with my camera. Children are playing round the grim buildings that front the river, something you see all over Eastern Europe in the way you used to in Britain in the 1950s and 60s when my generation was growing up. Our guide has already commented on this, saying that smart phones and computer games have yet to take over the lives of the young in the way they have in the west. They laugh and giggle as I photograph them, then line up to pose and wave merrily at me. “Hola” they shout, “hi!” And I can’t even say hello or thank you back to the, in Bulgarian!

This is one of the grimmest urban environments I’ve seen on this cruise, so much the worse because of what was destroyed to create it. Rust, weeds, rotting concrete are everywhere. Even the river frontage, normally the showpiece of every riparian settlement, is brutalised by socialist-realist buildings that are not only ugly in themselves but disproportionate in their scale. The railway station seems to be an exception to this rule, contemporary, clean, functionally elegant - but then I step inside the ticket hall that fronts the rectangular plaza as if to say, here at least is an attempt to do something that will make the twentieth century worth remembering. It is deserted and has every appearance of having also been long abandoned. I may be wrong about this - after all, it is Sunday afternoon and no rail movements are due for a while. But as I look up at the destination indicator, my eye is caught by two pigeons staring down at me from their perch on top of the board. This is our domain now, they seem to say. At least till Monday morning.

Outside the station is an object of genuine beauty. It’s a bronze sculpture commemorating those who fell in the conflicts that have plagued the Balkans for so many centuries. Here is a soldier looking down at his own sword in sorrow for the suffering and death it has been responsible for during his time of service. It symbolises the universal longing for peace that achieves real poignancy. Here is humanity’s best self, undaunted by the corrosive effects of living under one tyranny after another.