Blue Danube to Black Sea Day 11: A Fault Line in Central Europe

Tuesday 4 June
We awaken to thick fog. Both banks of the river are clothed in the mist. Occasionally the ghostly outline of an onion-spited church or a house can be glimpsed among trees that are no more than shadows on the river banks. From time to time tree trunks and branches drift languidly by. The fog emphasises our insulation from the world we are gliding through. We sail on in this capsule that is gliding so effortlessly across Eastern and Central Europe.

I speculate about the hazards of navigating in these conditions. I’ve read enough about the Danube to realise how tricky it is to stay safely within the deep water channels, avoid the sandbars that are constantly shifting with the changing currents of the Danube as it responds to rainfall and snowmelt upstream. These 135 metre-long river cruisers are flat bottomed, enabling them to negotiate the river in all but the driest conditions (I came across a bitter complaint on social media from last year telling us how, when customers were already en route for the airport, Riviera had had to cancel a cruise because there was not enough water in the river to navigate safely).

After breakfast the mist has cleared and we go out on deck to enjoy the sunshine. We have now travelled beyond the Romanian border, so all around it is Serbia. Pretty villages line the river bank on the south side where a line of hills sweeps down to the river. The Danube is very high round here. On the north bank, there is extensive flooding isolating horses, cattle and pigs. Bird life is abundant, and a group of voyagers has gathered with their field glasses and notebooks pointing out what’s to be seen - storks, terns, Black-winged stilts, squacco herons, bee-eaters nesting in holes in sandy banks, wagtails, little winged plovers, a white-tailed eagle, and even golden orioles - heard but not seen.

That’s an impressive list of fauna, but I claim no credit for it. I've no eye for bird life, alas. It calls for an attention to detail that I seem not to have been gifted with. I've always been drawn to the bigger picture. But I've enjoyed overhearing what these experts have been discussing for an hour this morning - obsessives they tell me they are happy to be called. One of them says that the history and politics have passed him by on this voyage, but the ornithology has been to die for. He could sit on deck all day peering into the forests to enjoy their natural history. I reply how good it is that on this cruise there is something for everyone. But another affirms that for her, the history and politics have been eye-opening. “This voyage on the Danube has made me a better European” she says with real conviction. I love that because it’s been precisely the same for me.

We draw in to Novi Sad. My guide book is unremittingly negative about this once elegant Habsburg city, Serbia’s second largest with a quarter of million inhabitants. It suffered badly in the Balkan wars, all three Danube bridges being destroyed in 1999. Our Serbian guide corrects one misapprehension about this. It’s said that NATO bombed them all. In fact, the bridge by Vauban’s citadel was blown up by Serbian forces themselves to avoid offering up the citadel as a target for the bombers. Now these three bridges have been rebuilt, the finest of them an “infinity” bridge like Stockton’s, opened last year.

We take a coach tour of the city, and there is more Serbian history to go with it. Novi Sad (= "new orchard") is another very ancient settlement that became Roman Cusum when it was conquered and incorporated into the imperial province of Pannonia. We see Roman tombs outside the museum in which there is a good collection of antiquities. I wish we had time to look inside. In the centuries following the collapse of the Roman Empire, the city had a complicated history in which Hungarians, Slavs and later the Ottoman Empire all vied for control. In Habsburg days it was Ratzen Stadt, "Serb City".

We get to the final decade of the twentieth century and the terrible cost of Yugoslavia's break-up. Unlike a previous Serbian guide, today's doesn’t dismiss the 1990s as merely “difficult”. She points out that Serbia sits on fault lines that divide Rome from Constantinople, and Catholic from Orthodox, and Christian from Moslem, and after the last world war, all faith groups from the communists. So it’s not surprising that conflict is an ever-present risk in this part of Europe. And because whoever controls the Danube controls central Europe, Novi Sad’s bridges are always going to be vulnerable to attack. “It’s happened for centuries” she says, “and the 1990s attacks will probably not be the last”. It’s a sobering introduction to the city.

We drive round the citadel, noting the entrances to the tunnels that Empress Maria Theresa ordered to be constructed underneath the fortifications. Mention of her name introduces the geographical position of this place. Our guide says we are not to think of Novi Sad as a Balkan city but rather as belonging to the Pannonian Plain that links it to the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. This is a highly cosmopolitan city she says, in which no fewer than eight languages are officially recognised. And as we drive round, we can’t help noticing the colourful, vibrant character of the centre. It’s a lot better than my gloomy prognostications informed by my book - but then that was written closer to the destructive Balkan wars than we are now. I have already decided that I like this place a lot more than Belgrade.

We walk round the centre. In the Orthodox Church our guide explains that it is strongly influenced by western ecclesiastical architecture. Completed only in 1903 rather in the style of a London Wren church, it has stained glass windows, most unusual for a church in the east. She elaborates on further differences between Orthodox and Catholic architecture and spirituality, including an excursus on the Iconoclastic controversy in order to explain why Orthodox churches are filled with paintings but have no sculpture. The significance of the iconostasis is explained, as is the liturgy of Orthodoxy with its Little and Great Entrances. And the importance of the eastern tradition of standing throughout the liturgy. It’s good that all this is spelled out to people who may be unfamiliar with the practices of the Orthodox (or, for that matter, any other) Church.

In the free time we have we wander round the streets, and visit the Catholic Church in the central square (for there is a significant minority Catholic community here). It’s a nicely designed hall church whose aisle vaults reach the same height as the central nave.

But after the Orthodox Church, it leaves us cold. There isn’t the same spirit of devotion here, somehow, the same fervour, the same conviction. I can’t explain it, but for the first time I begin to see what it is that many western Christians find so appealing about Eastern Christianity. One of my theological students is now an Orthodox priest, while another has made the journey there and come back to Anglicanism, albeit enriched by his experience. I recall my discussion with our Bulgarian young guide Peter on the coach, how he complained that his Catholic upbringing gave him no hint of the rich treasures of mystical prayer that Orthodoxy had opened up for him. There’s a clear lesson for us practitioners of western Christianity. Whatever else it is, it needs to be more impassioned, more affective, less milk-and-water, less sweetly reasonable, less afraid of touching and changing lives. This, I imagine, is what lies behind these "Thy Kingdom Come" days between Ascension and Pentecost that we are travelling through at this precise time.

Back on the ship I sit by the open window and gaze out at the river. It’s a lazy, sultry afternoon. We’ve already had one thunderstorm today, but the cumulonimbus is piling up again and promises more to come. A push-tug propels a heavy load of barges upstream at barely more reaching walking pace against a fierce current energised by the recent downpours. This journey is almost at an end. We have come a long way together, and I’m clear that my writing about it is only the beginning of the search for understanding what it may mean for my own Europeanism and my grasp of this continent’s past, present and future. There is so much I realise I don’t know. What wasn’t I paying attention to all these years? Why has this closed book of Eastern Europe only now begun to open for me, in just the same way as classical Greece did last autumn?

But there is still time for curiosity and discovery even this late in life. “Old men should be explorers” said Joseph Haydn in old age, a man from the golden age of imperial Austria-Hungary whose ear for the natural world was so well-tuned and whose music, therefore, must have been inspired by the Danube that flowed through the landscapes that he loved. I hope I can live and die as an explorer of the spirit. A voyage like this is the best possible metaphor, as it is the best possible stimulus too.