Blue Danube to Black Sea Day 12: Memories of the Balkan Wars

Wednesday 5 June
At Vukovar. This is one of the few calling points on this cruise whose name is familiar. Mohacs, Vidin, Pleven, Tulcea, Novi Sad, Rousse, Cernavoda... maybe I ought to have heard of these because they are all sizeable towns but I hold my hand up to admit that I haven’t. (Yes I know, of course we’ve heard of Budapest, Bucharest and Belgrade too... but these are capital cities, so there’d be no excuse.) But Vukovar? Surely everyone who lived through the 1990s and was paying even the slightest attention to the news from beyond our shores has heard of this little place on the Croatian (south) bank of the Danube. For this was right in the front line of the Yugoslav War between Serbia and Croatia, and took a terrible hammering in the conflict in the autumn of 1991.

Our young guide is one of the best we’ve had on this voyage. She tells us she studied English and German at university, but she has an intellectual and cultural hinterland that’s impressive. She cuts straight to the chase as we form up in our group. “Over there you can see the town’s water tower, built in the 1970s. It was hit in the war of 1991. It’s a symbol of all that Vukovar suffered in that year. This city was almost completely flattened in the war. Those buildings that weren’t destroyed were riddled with bullet holes that bear witness to the ferocity of the fighting. Some of them are being restored but others have been left as they are, as a memorial to the conflict of that year.”

I was in my early forties in 1991. At Coventry Cathedral where I worked at the time, we raised money for the victims of the conflict and filled enormous skips with foodstuffs, medical supplies, blankets and children’s toys for Vukovar. But I’m ashamed to say that I had only the vaguest understanding of the political and ethnic roots of this conflict that was happening, not on the other side of the world but in our own continent of Europe. In particular, I had forgotten that the Danube was the front line of the war between Serbia and Croatia; neither had I remembered the three month Siege of Vukovar, nor one of the very worst of the atrocities, the assault on the town hospital when two hundred non-Serbian patients and staff were taken away in trucks, corralled in a remote farmhouse for three days, then slaughtered like cattle. And they were only some of the many thousands of victims (on both sides) who perished by the Danube that year.

This is the first time we’ve felt that a guide has been candid with us about the events of a quarter of a century ago. Of course, the narrative is much more complex than a tour guide can possibly present in a few minutes. But there’s no dispute that the war happened as a direct result of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milocevic’s expansionist plans for a Greater Serbia, aided by Serbian militia leaders, in particular Jaradan Karadic, This is the “secret in the family” that we’ve found it so hard to penetrate in conversation with Serbians. It is incredibly hard for them to speak about their recent shameful past. It’s always easier for the victim to tell the story than the oppressor who has been shamed before the world, as the trials for war crimes and genocide at The Hague have done.

So I ask our Croatian guide about relationships with Serbia today. “They are normalising” she says, without hesitating, but I suspect choosing her words with care. “Another generation has grown up since those days. The young think in different ways from their parents and grandparents. This country is now a member of the European Union. My generation wants to break down barriers, not erect them. So our relations with Serbia are no different from those with any other of our neighbours. Maybe she wants to add, “even if the history will still haunt us for many years to come.” The healing of memories doesn’t happen in a few short years. And as I’ve written already, the ethnic fault lines haven’t gone away. 30 per cent of Vukovar’s population is Serb. In this Catholic country, there are sizeable minorities of Orthodox believers. And although religion did not (she says) play a part in the Croatian conflict (which sets it apart from those in Bosnia and Kosovo), its temples and rituals still act as markers of identity. Peace and reconciliation are real enough here, I think. But it’s sobering to realise how hard-won they are, how fragile they must continue to be for decades to come.

She is speaking as we drive past the railway station. “We don’t have trains any more” she laments. The building is ruinous. It cuts a forlorn figure among the twenty first century industrial and commercial buildings going up all round it. I badly want to get out and photograph this poignant scene, but time is not on our side. I do my best from the coach and wonder, not for the first time on this cruise, how humanity can be so brutal to its own kind, how little our race has learned from the relentless wars and conflicts that have bloodied the soil of our continent.

We are reminded that Croatia has been a member of the EU since 2013, the second of the former Yugoslav states to join (the first was Slovenia which joined as far back as 2004 and is in the Eurozone, unlike Croatia). I ask what effect EU membership has had on the country. It’s mixed, says our guide. On the one hand the young especially value the freedom of movement they didn’t know before. On the other hand, there has not (yet) been much inward investment to show for member status, so there’s been a brain drain of young bright able professionals to Germany especially, and also (surprisingly?) Ireland. She doesn’t mention the EU funds that have helped reconstruct the country since the war and developed its transport infrastructure, particularly here in Slavonia. A long way from the national capital Zagreb and the country’s celebrated coast, East Croatia is not much visited by tourists. Which is why she thanks us for coming to this less well known part of her country. It’s sincerely meant.

40 kilometres over the level plain and along an arrow-straight road stands the city of Osijek, the fourth largest in Croatia. The name means “ebb tide” because it stands slightly above the marshlands of the Drava flood-plain that always threatened to flood the environment. Murad of antiquity, it was a colonia of the Empire in Hadrian’s time. After the Ottoman centuries it was taken by the Habsburgs in the late seventeenth century and the old city is hallmarked with Austro-Hungarian splendour. The eighteenth century town includes grand military buildings, a courthouse and a Friary with a large baroque church popularly known as Saint Antony’s. Of Padua, this one, patron saint of lost things and lost causes, depicted on a large eighteenth century painting of dubious quality but undeniable charm, and better still, in a contemporary sculpture outside, He is holding the infant Jesus seated on the book of the scriptures, a pose familiar all over Europe. “Tony, Tony, come around, / Something’s lost and must be found” quips our guide.

And indeed we seem to be back in the catholic west in this royal free city where the spirit of Empress Maria Theresa might have walked last week. You feel that Budapest and Vienna can’t be far away. Trinity Square, surely one of the most elegant piazzas in Europe, is dominated by a column dominated by a baroque sculpture of the Holy Trinity. It was put up in 1729 to give thanks for the end of the plague Osijek had suffered and that had carried off some of its most distinguished citizens. I can’t recall ever having set eyes on a full-blown sculpture of the Trinity before, certainly not in a public square. I’m uneasy about the theological propriety of this, if I’m honest, but the patron or sculptor would no doubt reply that if it’s permitted to paint the Trinity, why should a sculpture be inappropriate? But this is precisely the point. What our visits to Orthodox churches have taught us is that painting is an entirely different medium from plastic sculpture. A two-dimensional drawing or painting is a “projection” that demands to be read in a symbolic way (because that’s the only way to make sense of it). A three dimensional “representation” - a bust, a statue - risks being reified into an object in its own right as if to say, the reality is just like this, only bigger. That clearly won’t do in a monotheistic religion. Which is why the iconoclastic controversy is so important in the development of the separate artistic traditions of the churches of the east and the  west.

This old city would be the perfect imperial picture postcard except for one thing: the pockmarked buildings that remind us of a conflict much more recent than the War of the Spanish Succession or the Napoleonic campaigns. Eight hundred people were killed when the town was shelled from August 1991 to June 1992, about half the total number of citizens from Osijek killed in the Croatian War of Independence. And lest my account has seemed to be heavily tilted against the Serbian expansionism that gave rise to the conflict in the first place, its important to recall that at least five Croatian officials were indicted for war crimes against the Osijek Serbs. Here as everywhere else, conflict brutalises all its participants. In these Balkan wars, everyone was a victim in the end. As was truth, always the first casualty of war.

The complete story, inevitably much more complex and intractable than popular narrative, has yet to be told here in the lower Danube. Some historians say we are not even close to gaining a full perspective on the Great War more than a hundred years ago, let alone this one. It takes time for history to coalesce, settle down into a shape and configuration that its participants can own for themselves. Just as I’m aware, as the cruise comes to an end, that my own first impressions of it jotted down in this blog will take time to mature, become nuanced, even begin to do justice to the complexity of what I have seen and learned in this fortnight on the river. How do you take in such a tangled, such an ancient, such a contested political history from the deck of a luxury cruise ship and the window of an air-conditioned coach? What, intellectually speaking, is “responsible tourism” in these circumstances?

We wander round Osijek’s civic centre, a triangular piazza where the only wheels allowed apart from bicycles and push chairs are the trams. They have been running for 135 years, says our guide proudly. So this is a real city. It feels lively enough to qualify, even if it only has a pro-cathedral, the red brick neo-gothic church of St Peter and St Paul whose spires dominate the town. Outside, children are playing in the fountains and clambering on to a bronze sculpture depicting the citizens of Osijek. By the marina coffee shops are doing a brisk trade. There’s a holiday atmosphere here. The long summer school vacation is about to begin.

As we arrive back at the ship, a few of us notice what looks like a haphazard pile of concrete slabs on the grass by the quayside. This turns out to be a striking and eloquent sculpture. The slabs have been cut, presumably from buildings destroyed in the war, with triangular heads to resemble rough-hewn tombstones. On each is a “found” relic of the conflict - a piece of shattered glass, a graffito, pieces of twisted steel. The stones are all leaning over at crazy angles like a procession of dominoes frozen at the moment of toppling. For this is indeed “the toppling city”, a town so completely shattered by war yet with its spirit, even in the act of falling, not torn from it, not yet, not ever. It reminds me of the “Plumb Line and the City” sculpture in Coventry Cathedral where the uprightness and integrity of a community, symbolised by buildings of every shape and size, is measured against Amos’ vertical plumb line suspended above it. Here, nothing is straight, nothing is true, nothing stands upright any more.

And yet the spirit of the place, its daemon if you like, is undefeated despite the worst that the aggressor can do. Why did not our excellent guide mention it when the sculpture is clearly meant to be the first thing you see when you land in this damaged but powerfully evocative place? It’s another of those visits on this cruise that would not be on anyone’s bucket list for scenic beauty but is so well worth spending time in for all that it has to tell us about the times in which we live.

So taken am I with this sculpture that I forget to check the time. I am the last on board, only a couple of minutes late, but nonetheless chided for it (in the nicest possible way). Everyone knows that I'm the one the ship is waiting for because when we go ashore, we check ourselves out with our electronic key cards, and check back in again when we return. I'm sure this is a detail of twenty-first century cruising that readers of this blog would want to know about.

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The ship sets off on its last and longest leg back upstream to Budapest. The community resumes its dreamy existence dislocated from the historical turbulence of these troubled shores. There is afternoon tea in the lounge with cakes and conversation to enjoy. Apart from that I spend the afternoon on deck watching the miles of forest drift by, interspersed by the occasional settlement that has gathered round a white baroque church spire. I realise again how remote this landscape is, how little populated. I’ve already written about the lack of drama on this cruise compared with the Upper Danube and still more the Rhine. There is little to see other than at the high points of any Danube voyage such as the Iron Gates. But this very evenness is part of the beauty of it, this fortnight of green, ordinary time that has a mesmeric, almost retreat-like quality because of the way it distends the cycles of each day. Millions of trees, vast expanses of water, wide skies become all the more miraculous when there is nothing else to look at. This for me is the most important spiritual insight of this fortnight. As I’ve said, it makes a contemplative out of me - or has the potential to if only I will let it.

But there is one moment of drama that takes us by surprise and has us holding on to our hats - literally. We’ve all noticed how high the river is at present, flooding the banks, invading the forests, its level even swallowing up the bottom of the tree canopy. We approach a border bridge that carries a railway line. It can scarcely be higher than the height of this ship’s bridge. In fact, we would collide with it were it not for some clever technology that lowers the entire bridge, foremast and everything else protruding above deck level. One of the crew walks along and tells us to sit down as we pass underneath. You could literally touch the steel girders. If the river were a few inches higher, this stretch would be impassable to ships like ours. It’s an exciting photo opportunity we SLR brigade are not expecting.

By dinner time I’m left entirely alone on deck. I’ve loved these hours of solitude with the woods and the water and the reddening sky. It’s like being on the beach when everyone else has packed up their things and gone home. It’s a travel-writing cliché to talk about the magic of such moments. It would take a Delius to find a musical language that could do justice to this peace and tranquility of a Summer Night on the River. And a Wordsworth to do the same in poetry, given that we are sailing on his eponymous ship.

Tonight there’s a pub quiz to test our knowledge of the Danube and the places we’ve visited. Our foursome does pretty well, though we struggle to match memories and mental images to so many of these places with (to us) unpronounceable names. Two weeks of five countries with their distinctive landscapes, cities and towns, their churches and mosques, their citadels and antiquities, flow into one another. How did that great Danubian writer Patrick Leigh Fermor keep his memories distinct, unentangled, write it all down with a hindsight that was so clear, so focused?

But maybe it doesn’t matter too much. What matters is the experience of the river and its people that has touched us, maybe changed our perceptions in important ways. Could it have been transformative? Only time will tell.

The ship sails on towards Hungary.