Blue Danube to Black Sea Day 14: National Pride and Ambiguous Memory

Friday 7 June
I’m glad of the late flight that gives us this additional day in Budapest. Well, Pest actually. We begin by walking upstream along the promenade. We come to the “shoes” in memory of the Jews who were hurled into the icy Danube in 1944. It hardly needs saying how moving this sight is: boots, shoes, slippers, what looks like a little girl’s dancing shoes. Votive lights with Hebrew texts have been placed among, and even inside, these infinitely forlorn objects, so full of pathos, that speak more eloquently than words ever could about “the heartbreak at the heart of things”. And when I remember that the South Koreans drowned in a Danube within sight of this shrine, it simply adds to the painfulness of this part of the river bank.

As we walk on, the immense Parliament building looms up above us. We go inside the visitor centre and find that there is a place available on an English language tour of the building this afternoon. So I’ll come back to that later. The sun has come out and it’s warming up rapidly. We walk out of the shadow side of the Parliament (nice turn of phrase?) and into the sunshine. The glare from this extraordinary building is almost painful. Soldiers are on guard. The anti-terror barricades are not the crude lumpish blocks you see in London but integrated into the architecture of the square, which is surrounded by fine buildings. Indeed, everywhere in central Budapest the buildings are on a monumental scale. The green spaces are a relief from this surfeit of grandeur whether its imperial, neo-classical, art nouveau or modern. It’s tempting to compare it with Paris (again) but the difference is that Pest has no Notre Dame and no Left Bank to set off the monumental with something more intimate in scale. Buda has those things of course, but once these were separate cities and their respective urban styles architecture seem to tell different stories. Like Newcastle and Gateshead, maybe?

We go inside the Basilica of St Stephen’s. Aggressively neo-classical, vast and imposing, a noble Greek cross that on the outside fully rises to the challenge of the imperial architecture that surrounds it. But the interior feels gloomy and lifeless. Like St Sava in Belgrade, far from bringing me to my knees it leaves me cold. But it’s humanised by a group of young schoolchildren at the front of the nave who are singing their hearts out under the tutelage of their teacher.

But the gloom of the Basilica is more than made up for by our discovering the Church of the Assumption by the river. It’s Pest’s parish church and its oldest. The site is ancient: under glass in the floor we can see extensive remains of the Roman camp that once stood here on the bank of the Danube. There are remains of Romanesque and this provides the highlight of this rebuilt gothic church. Behind the high altar is all that’s left of some wall paintings. The crowning glory is a most beautiful depiction of the Assumption. It’s graceful and delicate, art that is full of love and devotion. But I’m even more moved by a painting to one side. It once showed Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane. Almost all of him is lost, except his hands held together in prayer, just like the famous Dürer drawing. And what’s best of all in this Romanesque Wall painting, surviving intact, is the image of God the Father, listening intently to his Son’s prayer as he hides behind a tree. The association must be to the Garden of Eden - how winsomely it’s done, and how rich theologically!

And so back to the Parliament Building for the guided tour. I won’t describe the architecture: the travel writers can indulge their superlatives and rhapsodise about this amazing edifice. Suffice to say that it’s a cross between the fairy-tale Chateau of Pierrefonds in northern France, and St Pancras Station with, of course, the obvious homage to the British Houses of Parliament (but this is in much better condition). National rhetoric and a (very very) proudly imagined past come into things at every turn - in the symbolism of the architecture, the sculptures of national heroes and the ordinary Volk - artists, craftspeople, scientists, philosophers, engineers. Gold leaf is on display in abundance.

But the clue to this place lies at its geometric centre. Here, underneath the dome (more Florence than Rome or St Paul’s), the crown regalia are kept in a sealed case of toughened glass. Round it is an innocent looking rope - but alarmed. That in turn is guarded by two military officers with guns. Touch the ropes, alarms will sound and the soldiers will as likely as not fire - that’s the message we are given. Oh, and photography, allowed everywhere else on the tour, is not permitted here, again on pain of - well, who knows? The regalia which go back to the eleventh century and Hungary’s king-Saint Stephen I are clearly treated as holy objects, the embodiment of the nation. Is this the real reason photography is forbidden, not any security risk so much as the violation of a sacred space that bears mystical significance?

I walk back via Freedom Square. On the far side is a memorial to the hundreds of thousands of Hungarians who perished in the Holocaust. Most were Jews, but we must never forget the Roma, the political dissidents and the gays who also ended their days in the extermination camps. This memorial shows the eagle of the Third Reich descending on Hungary brandishing a huge and evil claw bearing the year 1944 that’s about to lay hold on and devour the woman below, the personification of Hungary. On the ground is a classical pillar twisted out of shape. It’s powerful but it’s hard not to read this grotesque image as kitsch. There is an inscription in Hebrew and Hungarian, and a date - 19 March 1944. This was the day the German eagle landed on its former ally, its hanging black claw dragging Hungary viciously into the Reich that would last a thousand years. “That’s what the Nazis did to us.”

But that way of telling the story by blaming the Nazis has become extremely politicised. It seems that Viktor Orban had the memorial erected under cover of darkness and without consultation in order to establish once and for all where blame for the Hungarian holocaust belonged. But history does not bear this out. Hungary appeared to welcome the Nazi occupation with the same enthusiasm as Austria did. What’s more, Hungarians were not only complicit with their occupiers but initiated their own outrages against their fellow citizens including the Jews murdered in the river. (There was also a terrible massacre at Novi Sad, then under Hungarian rule. I don’t recall hearing anything about it when we were there.) So those protesting against this memorial, who include liberal politicians, civic leaders, academics and relatives of the victims, have brought memorabilia from 1944 and laid them out at the foot of the monument. They have also displayed images, photographs explanatory texts in all the world’s principal languages. They are challenging the Orban government to take responsibility for what happened in that terrible year and tell the truth about Hungarian involvement in it. This protest memorial has not been swept away - yet. If it were to be, there would be an outcry.

Of all that I’ve seen on this cruise, this memorial will, I think, stay with me longest. The image is meant to be unforgettable and it is - for all the wrong reasons. It encapsulates so many of the dilemmas of Central and Eastern Europe that we’ve been faced with on this journey: how nations tell their stories, how they face up to their past, how they define their identities in the present, what kind of futures they aspire to. To that extent, the rhetoric of the Parliament Building and of this memorial is the same. Am I right to be worried about the nationalism they both represent in this beautiful but paradoxical country? And can its Europeanism save it from all that’s corrupting in the emergence of the politics of the far right?

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And if this is a question for Hungary, what about the other Danube lands from Germany and Austria in the west to Serbia and Croatia, Romania and Bulgaria in the east? And what about the UK? While we’ve been away the results of the European Parliament elections have shown how the postwar politics of our continent are being reframed in ways that couldn’t have been predicted when we were growing up and when the postwar political consensus seemed settled not only for our own lifetimes but those of our children too. Britain is as exposed to these changes as anywhere else in Europe. 

It’s tempting to see history as offering precedents. The rise of right wing populism across the world suggests parallels with the 1930s. I’ve wondered whether visiting Orban’s Budapest in the 2010s is like visiting Berlin in the 1930s - beautiful, seductive but full of portents. I’m sure this is far too facile. “The chief practical use of history is to deliver us from plausible historical analogies” said the Liberal politician James Bryce quoted in a recent article in the London Review of Books, “Populism and the People” by Jan-Werner Müller. Travelling around central and eastern Europe opens your eyes to the history of our continent but we should be wary of drawing parallels. That may be one of the most important things I’ve learned here. Good Europeanism must be earthed in a proper use of history, not an imagined past.

So if this voyage has taught me anything, it’s made me a better European, to quote the fellow-traveller who shared her thoughts with me as we were drawing into Novi Sad. What does “better” mean? Not so much that I’m more convinced than ever of the importance of the European Project, though I think that’s true. No, I mean that it’s revealed how little I knew my continent, how western my assumptions about had been, how much I need to learn about all those who share our common European home, whether the people next door or those who are further down the street.

And what’s true of the continent I call home is also true of the planet I call home. If travel doesn’t make us citizens of the world, why take ourselves off at some cost to cruise down a far-off river not our own? But it is our own. That’s the point. We are privileged to see what we have seen. It’s been hugely stimulating and enjoyable. But beyond the pleasures of a holiday, the companionship and conversation, stories to tell and memories to share, sightseeing, fresh air, relaxation and rest, what matters for travel, what is ultimately important, is how it changes us, and therefore what we do next. I suppose that's why I've been writing this blog of our voyage - not as a record of things seen and done, but as a way of woolgathering, thinking on the page about how and why it should make a difference.  

But for now it is time to get on the coach that will take us to the airport.

Blue Danube to Black Sea Day 13: Back in Hungary

Thursday 6 June
Our last full day on the ship. We have a leisurely breakfast. I go up on deck to write up this blog. It is overcast but warm. We have been extremely fortunate with the weather on this cruise. Rain and thunderstorms have been forecast, but the rain has fallen when we’ve been tucked up in our cells (sorry, cabins) and apart from the spectacular storm at Belogradchik, which was such a gift photographically, we have dodged them on our walks and visits.

After two weeks, voyagers are talking to one another more readily now, sharing stories and experiences, reminiscing about the sights we have seen, contemplating going home. I find myself conversing with a number of people I haven’t spoken to before about everything from Bird Watching to Bach to Brexit - nothing  especially deep, nothing especially lengthy, but the kind of talk that happens when people feel relaxed with one another. Maybe it’s the knowledge that our life together on this ship is coming to an end in the next few hours, but this has been a pretty comfortable kind of “total community” (to go back to my musings on Day One).

By midday we are back at Budapest where our voyage began. We dock by the Chain Bridge, further upstream than when we were here before. From our cabin we have a marvellous view across the river to Buda with its citadel crowning the Acropolis on the other side of the bridge. Is there a city in the world that has exploited its river so effectively as Budapest has the Danube? It’s a silly question really when you think of Paris or London or New York or Lyon or Newcastle. But here it’s the strongly individual character of the river itself that adds texture to the city. Even when the Danube is not in flood, its surface is never placid here, never truly calm, always turbulent with currents and eddies unlike most other great rivers in the world, at least not by the time they flow through their great cities. And we are all conscious of the tragedy that has happened in the Danube since we were last here, the sudden catastrophic sinking of that pleasure boat only a few hundred metres upstream from where we are moored at this moment. The circumstances are still not entirely clear, but you have to wonder how much the rapidity and capriciousness of the Danube were factors in the deaths of so many people last week.

We board the coach for our last excursion, a panoramic drive around the city. We start with the left bank, Pest. Our guide is fluent and informative, telling us about the succession of great buildings we pass, pointing out their architectural styles and highlighting sites of particular significance in the city’s history. The profusion of Art Nouveau is striking, especially the famous entrance to the Zoo. We drive round the Place of Heroes, and pass the South Korean Embassy where it’s moving to see flowers laid in memory of the Danube’s victims last week.

At the Holocaust Memorial alongside one of Budapest’s central synagogues, we learn about the Jewish community in the city. By no means all its members perished in the Nazi era because unlike in more isolated communities in the countryside where whole communities were sent to the extermination camps, there were simply too many Jews in Budapest for their persecutors to achieve the Final Solution they had set themselves. Nevertheless there horrific stories told about Budapest’s Jews, but the Nazis were not the only perpetrators of terrible cruelty. Once, hundreds of Budapest’s Jews were rounded up on the banks of the Danube, told to take off their shoes, then tipped into the icy river to perish. The Hungarians who committed this outrage were themselves summarily shot minutes later. Budapest still has a significant Jewish presence with a dozen or so synagogues, far fewer than before the war, but these are still a vital part of the city’s religious diversity. Most of them are liberal or reform Jews, rather than orthodox.

Not far away we drive down a street where buildings opposite each other are pockmarked with bullet holes. They preserve a memory of events only eleven years after the end of the Second World War when the abortive Hungarian Uprising was brutally suppressed by Soviet forces. I can just about remember talk of events in Hungary in 1956 when I was a six year old. Looking at Budapest today, with all its vitality, confidence and cosmopolitanism, by all accounts a successful and certainly a truly European city, you would not guess that so much has had to be reconstructed following the events of the 1940s and 1950s.

After Bucharest, I’m wary of making judgments based on very little knowledge. Appearances can be deceptive. I’m aware that the policies of Viktor Orban’s regime, while not questioning Hungary’s commitment to the European Union, are infusing it with right wing, nationalistic ideology that is in real tension with the European ideal. And although this has nothing to do with religion, it’s troubling that Hungary’s Catholic history and identity is being invoked to justify it. The bitter memories of the socialist era doesn’t altogether explain this phenomenon, though similar tendencies are observable in other former Eastern bloc countries as we’ve seen on this journey. Maybe Hungary’s historic identity, rooted in the Magyar migrations from central Asia and the distinctive language they brought to Europe have contributed to a Hungarian exceptionalism that sets it apart from its neighbours whether Germanic and Slav. These are among the seeds sown by what our guide has to say to us today. Plenty of food for thought to take back to Brexit Britain tomorrow.

We cross the Danube by the Chain Bridge, the oldest extant and most venerable of Budapest’s bridges. The magnificent view over the river opens up, including the Parliament Building upstream. There, just below, is our ship. I look down at it fondly. However enjoyable they are to sail in, I don’t find these cruise ships beautiful to look at. They are supposed to look shiny and sleek, but unlike seagoing vessels, their sheer length and lack of draught suggests an oversized floating railway carriage. But it has been our home for two weeks and we have been looked after well by people who care about what they do and do it well.

Over in Buda, we are embroiled in heavy traffic so our guide chats amiably with us about our cruise. How many countries have we visited? Which did we like best? Hungary of course! comes the reply, for people on holiday are always eager to please. No seriously, he insists. There’s no clear answer to this unanswerable question. He goes through them by turn. When we get to Serbia he says, “People often find Serbia difficult. Maybe that’s because of the history and how it has shaped people there. But I think it’s a wonderful country.” This is intriguing. So is this. “Now that you’ve spent time in Serbia and Croatia, you may think you now understand the Balkan wars. If that’s the case, then you need to go to Bosnia-Herzegovina. You’ll realise that you haven’t begun to understand it at all.” Like Brexit, as he quips later on, which is another of those Schleswig-Holstein questions (only ever understood by three people, the first of whom had forgotten, the second had died and the third gone mad).

We get out at the citadel. It was inevitable that the tour would end here at the Fishermen’s Bastion. It is thronged with people. The view is undeniably very fine but I can’t get any decent images for hoards of youngsters taking selfies on the parapets. And the concept of this self-conscious over-visited site feels like a tourist concoction, Budapest-as-cliché, not the authentic Hungarian city we have come to see. The river on the other hand, the city’s star attraction, never falls into trope. Is that because it’s a working river? Discuss.

But what I shall remember from this walk is our guide's parting shot to us. “Remember the Slovenian national anthem” he says. It’s the only one in the world that’s about world peace rather than one nation’s flourishing. Of course I have to look it up on the web. It goes like this:

God's blessing on all nations, Who long for that day When across the whole world No war, no strife holds sway; Who long to see that all are free;
No more shall foes, but neighbours be.

As for the Bastion, there is nothing to detain us here. We walk away from the bustle down steep steps. Suddenly it is quiet again. We come across an intimate pedestrian square created on a terrace surrounded by elegant modern buildings. I notice one of them is an architect’s practice, maybe the one that designed this project. There’s a small cafe there. We sit down and enjoy cool drinks while a little girl no more than two or three years old dances in front of  us. She is oblivious to her audience. She is filled with the unselfconscious joy of being alive. It’s beautiful and touching to watch.

We walk the promenade back towards the Chain Bridge. We are overtaken by cyclists in a hurry, and by trams ancient and modern. Lovers linger by the riverside parapet with eyes only for each other. On board ship, there are rites of passage to mark the end of our voyage. We reminisce with fellow guests over an amiable dinner, then go back to our cabin. Budapest is beautiful by night, and we have a spectacular view of it from our window.  

But for us, the journey is not quite over. We have a late flight tomorrow, so we shall have time to discover more of the city in the morning.

Blue Danube to Black Sea Day 1: A Thousand Miles to Go

This is the first episode of my blog about cruising down the Danube. Some of you may recall that I blogged about the Danube in 2014 when we made the river voyage upstream from Budapest into Austria, Germany and then Prague. We enjoyed it so much that we decided that when time and funds allowed, we would cruise downstream from Hungary to the Black Sea. So we did, there and back, an amazing journey of two thousand miles. The previous blog ran to a box set of nine episodes. This one, covering a two week voyage, will run to fourteen (yes, I know...). I wrote it during the cruise itself, if only to make sure I could recall where we were on each particular day before all those Eastern European names and memories of people, buildings and landscapes began to coalesce into one another.

My aim was to try to capture so much that was new to us east of Budapest, not least the culture and politics of nations we'd never visited before. I've now edited slightly and inserted some photographs. But it's mainly as written, complete with errors of fact (please tell me!) and - more important - all the risks that first impressions carry - superficial perceptions, shallow interpretations. These could be misleading in countries that have experienced decades, no, centuries, of alien rule and have also experienced terrible conflict in the twentieth century in two world wars and (in the case of two of them) the Balkan wars of the 1990s following the break-up of the former Yugoslavia.

With those caveats, here goes....


Friday 24 May
The airport is heaving with holidaymakers flying out to Lanzarote, Alicante, Rhodes and similar sunny destinations. The check-in queue snakes around the concourse and down to the entrance. The heart sinks. Why are there so many children and young people not at school on this last day before half-term begins, I ask grumpily? Suddenly the queue starts moving like an unblocked bowel. We learn that the luggage conveyor had stalled but has now been put right. Relief that constipation is over.

Thankfully, we are on a grown-up flight. Many of the passengers look likely candidates for the cruise, though not the cross-dressing young man at the front who is wearing a white outfit with a sash telling the world that he is the “Bride to Be”. The elderly man next to J seems unsure about flying and fumbles with his seatbelt. J is always helpful in these circumstances. We fly along the Danube valley. The river is unmistakeable, curling bulbously through Austria and Hungary, defining the historic empire. We recall our first Danube cruise five years ago when we sailed upstream from Budapest to Passau. Now we are to sail down from Budapest to the Black Sea. As we descend towards Budapest, huge thunderheads tower up on the horizon. But the plane does a 180 degree turn as it comes in to land, so worries about sudden downdrafts and rain squalls are needless. We land gently in Danubia.

It is a 50 minute drive from the airport to the ship. I have to remind myself which side of the river is Buda and which is Pest. My mnemonic is that West rhymes with Pest, but Pest is not West. Buda is where palace, church and Fishermen's Bastion perch on their Acropolis. Our visit there last time is coming back. Meanwhile P is for Pest and for Parliament, whose vast emblematic building stands on the opposite bank. It is late. In the darkness, the grand buildings on either side of the Danube and the bridges connecting them are beautifully lit.

There are arrival rituals: handwashing (for ritual as well as physical disinfecting), passports taken from us (creating a temporary society without nationality on this ship, though the point is to make crossing international frontiers easier to manage), photographs taken at check-in for ID, issuing of key-cards and so on. There is the usual nervous conversation of people who are strangers suddenly thrown together. Michael Argyle’s definition of a “total community” comes to mind, a group that works, lives, eats and sleeps within the same confines such as a prison, an asylum or a boarding school. The social architecture of our cruise ship begins to take shape and structure our existence for two weeks: fertile ground for observation and ethnographical analysis. What kind of people go on cruises? What kind of people have chosen this one? What kind of voyagers will we be? Tourists? Visitors? Guests? Or even pilgrims? Memories from Santiago last week are stirred. I try to remember the content of my addresses on pilgrimage.

It is all very well appointed, this ship. Our cabin (cell?) has everything you could need. But I do not expect to sleep this first night. There has been too much stimulus too late in the day, too much excitement. And I don’t. So I read from the second half of Andrew Beattie’s excellent book on the Danube* that I’ve brought with me. Part one served me well on the Upper Danube cruise we made five years ago. I’m surprised that the ship’s library doesn’t carry any books at all about the landscapes we shall travel through, not even the standard Rough Guide or Lonely Planet volumes on the five countries we shall be visiting. I’m aware of how little I know about Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria where we shall be setting foot during the voyage, to say nothing of Ukraine and Moldova which we may glimpse across the water.

Saturday 25 May
The evening and the morning of our first day. On this cruise there are no concessions to your long journey the day before or the lateness of your arrival. It’s up bright and early to be on the coach to go and visit the local city of Kalocsa. “My little city” says the bright young Hungarian guide endearingly.

First we visit the Italianate baroque cathedral. It is an enjoyable building, restrained compared to Passau or Melk upstream on the Danube, or indeed Santiago where I was only last week. Our guide waxes eloquent about the part beauty plays in evoking faith. Then he turns to the organ on the gallery. The great Franz Liszt played it several times, he tells us, and loved this amazing instrument. They are excavating medieval remains in front of the west end. The Archbishop's Palace reveals a marvellous library (“one of the twelve best in the world”) which contains priceless incunabula and early printed books, including an early edition of Luther’s Bible (yes, here in the heartland of catholic Hungary, though it is being "rested" at present so is not on display). A steward lurks in the corner to make sure we don't touch anything we shouldn't. I ask about conservation practice in Hungary and am told that it's second to none.

Then across the road to the only paprika museum in the world. There are limits to the excitement I am feeling about this much-trailed visit. The building looks vast. Is there any end to the role paprika plays in the cultural history of Hungary, I ask myself? Much to our relief, the museum consists of only a couple of rooms in the basement. Actually, it is surprisingly interesting to learn how central paprika has been and still is to the rural economy of Hungary. We inspect historic artefacts associated with its cultivation, harvesting and trade. I sense a renewed enthusiasm for Hungarian goulash awash with paprika. Except that we Brits appear to have misunderstood goulash which strictly speaking is a thick broth rather than a stew. We resist the paprika-themed souvenir shop and wander off to explore this intimate little city.

Apart from a pleasant pedestrianised boulevard lined with sculptures of Christian saints and local clergy, there is little to see other than a few once proud, now faded buildings that hark back to the days of Austro-Hungarian Empire. But there is a new museum by the cathedral, only opened three years ago, in which its ecclesiastical treasures are exhibited. It is beautifully constructed, partly out of a refurbished outbuilding of the Bishop's Palace, partly in a new purpose-built space. It seems deserted, but the doors are open. The serious young man at reception seems surprised that we would actually want to visit it, and pay however many thousand forints equates to the 3 euros it will cost us each. Having issued us with tickets, he follows us like a hound into every gallery to make sure we are behaving ourselves. It’s true that paintings, vestments, large items of silverware are on open display and could easily be damaged. J tries to explain that I am a priest (so above suspicion?) but I’m not sure he understands. After all, what would a priest be doing with a wife? 

After lunch we are back on the coach again bound for the city of Pécs. It's situated in one of the wine-growing regions of Hungary. Many of the signs with village place names have a German name underneath as we pass by. Our guide explains that in the eighteenth century Empress Maria Theresa needed viticulturists to develop and care for the vineyards, so Germans from Swabia came here in large numbers. They preserve their language and culture even to this day. All this we learn as part of a lucid survey of Hungarian history as we travel. We're told we shouldn’t think of Hungarians as Europeans but as Asians who migrated here in the early middle ages (Magyars who have nothing to do with Huns). This explains the peculiarities of the language which is neither Romance nor Slav, but related only to Finnish and Turkish. (Looking at the words for “left luggage” and “lost property” while we waited for our bags at the airport carousel has already made me wonder how any non-native speaker sets about learning this characterful but obscure language.)

On the coach some of us get talking about the European Union and Brexit. All the countries we shall be visiting are now EU members states apart from Serbia which has official candidate status and is likely to join in 2025. Our guide joins in. He is clearly one of his generation’s Europhiles too, so I ask him what he thinks about Viktor Orbán's politics. He looks wary and points to his guide’s badge. “While I have this on, I have to be impartial and not venture an opinion” he says. “Once I take it off, then I can speak for myself.” “Then take it off at once” I reply. He laughs. But it stays on. He is official. He is in role.

Pécs is an ancient episcopal city with a medieval university, cathedral and fortifications, a pretty picture in an unprepossessing (and oversized) suburban frame. Can I think of any city that is not let down by its suburbs, I ask myself? As a child of the banlieue, I can’t. We make for the Cathedral, a fine Romanesque building, its towers reminiscent of Speyer. Alongside is the Bishop’s Palace. Nearby in the garden is a statue of Frank Liszt peering up at the Cathedral. For all my love of Wagner, Liszt was never my favourite composer, this Abbé whose music doesn’t so much make the piano sing as suffer under the hammering he inflicts on it. But Hungarians are intensely proud of him (as they are of Kodály and Bartók. You can understand why. Maybe now that I have visited his country I need to listen more carefully. Just maybe.

The guided walk ends up in the city's central square. It's extremely noisy as some kind of festival is happening there, and a band is playing on a dais with the amplification turned up to maximum. We have some free time, we walk back to the Cathedral. But it's closing as we arrive. An apologetic steward tells us that evening mass is shortly to begin. “What time?” I ask. At 6 o’clock, we are told. That’s in one hour and a half. Does it take ninety minutes to clear the nave of visitors, set up for the service and invite the faithful in? Not in any cathedral I've worked in. But we can see enough of the nave to see that the Romanesque promised by the exterior is not delivered inside. It is harsh chiselled neo-Norman, heavily painted in dark hues, a style that is so much more unsympathetic than Neo-Gothic. And we would have had to pay to go inside and see it.

But then we have a wonderful surprise. On our way down to the centre of town, we stumble across what looks like an unprepossessing bunker with a half-open concrete door. This turns out to be the World Heritage Site of Cella Septichora, a unique and extensive Romano-Christian burial ground. Our guide had pointed it out beneath our feet just outside the Cathedral complex - you can look down at it through thick glass panels, but it’s impossible to make any sense of it from above. It’s an extraordinary and vast subterranean labyrinth of passageways, burial chambers and tunnels, reminiscent of the Catacombs. It would need several hours and a good guide to make sense of these wondrous spaces, but we are moved by what we see, most of all the fourth century burial chamber named after St Peter and St Paul where there are wall paintings of Adam and Eve, Daniel in the lions’ den, and Jonah in the belly of the fish, all palpably related to the theme of death and resurrection. A Christogram at the centre of the composition pulls it all together around the emblem of Constantine, “in this sign conquer”. Once again I sense the powerful allure of late antiquity, not least in its Christian phases. We love the atmosphere of this evocative and holy place. (While we are there, teenagers on a school outing are listening to a guide explaining it in Hungarian. Some of them are a lot more interested in their mobile phones than in late antiquity. Ah well. They are a bit young to be entertaining thoughts about their distant past, or even their own mortality, as we older voyagers are prone to do in a place like this.)

I wonder why we weren’t all urged to visit Septichora without fail. Maybe the cruise company doesn’t want to encourage people to go to sites where you have to pay to go in, the assumption being that the cruise excursions are all thrown in for free. But for a mere three euros each (reduced tariff for seniors), this must surely be one of the most memorable visits of the whole journey. It reminds us of the importance of doing our own research prior to each visit to make sure we don’t miss out on the must-sees by accident.

During dinner on the ship, we are all summoned to appear before reception to have our faces checked against our passports. This is because we are about to leave the EU at Mohács and cross over into Serbia at Bezdan. The process of checking our names and identities against the passenger list is called “revision”. Two uniformed Serbian police officers are sitting there scanning our documents. I think of the well-known names of their countrymen in my own lifetime, leaders like Slobodan Milošević, surely one of the worst men of the twentieth century for the bloodshed and genocide his policies unleashed on the Balkans. Given its recent history, the very name “Serbia” seems to hold something of the shadows about it. The Serbian river bank is dark and mysterious, obscure, like my knowledge of it. But these policemen are friendly enough, and even give us a smile as they check our passports. Maybe it's not just a case of passport "revision", but revising my own preconceptions about the country we are about to enter?

*Andrew Beattie, The Danube: a cultural history, Oxford, 2010.