Blue Danube to Black Sea Day 7: "The Sea! The Sea!"

Friday 31 May
We have been on board this ship for a week. Our life outside it seems distant. The community of passengers is developing structures: foursomes who stick together at mealtimes, couples who choose tables where they can be on their own, people who socialise in the lounge over tea or drinks, people who tend not to very much, camera people, book people, birdwatching people, talkative people, silent people, clubbable people, solitary people... all human life is here. It's part of the richness this fortnight, and it’s fascinating to observe.

There has been a thunderstorm tonight. At dinner, we discussed whether a ship on water is a safe place to be in an electrical storm. I hazard a guess that a ship, like an aeroplane or car is a Faraday Cage, so if it were struck, the charge would simply be carried round the vessel. But I’m unclear where the water underneath us comes into things, As I write about this, the peace of our cabin is shattered by a colossal thunderclap. I call that exquisite timing. I do not sleep, so I go to stand behind the curtain and look out at the storm. Lightning flashes dramatically above the river. It is raining heavily. And yet our ship glides on without the slightest hesitation or tremor. It’s uncanny how little sense of motion there is when you are not actually looking out at a changing landscape. After an hour the storm subsides. I retreat to my bed but not to sleep. There has been so much mental stimulation, so much information to take in. I need head space to process it all.

We arrive at Cernavoda at lunch time. The town sits on the right bank at one end of an impressive cantilever bridge that used to carry road and railway from Bucharest to the port of Constanta which is where we are headed for today’s excursion. Our guide is humourous and knowledgeable and can talk for Romania. There is nothing in Romanian geography, history, culture, economy, politics or social gossip about which he doesn’t have something to say. It is fascinating and tiring in equal measure. However it is genuinely interesting for the third time in this tour to hear a Romanian speak about the Ceausescu years. The freedom with which Romanians vent their feelings about the Ceausescus is remarkable. It’s not too much to say (in the words of the psalm) that they hate them with perfect hatred, or at least, the memory of them. Yet again we are told that when their bodies were examined after their trial and execution by firing squad, there were three times as many bullets in Elena’s body as there were in his. Ahab was bad, but Jezebel was infinitely worse - that seems to be the popular feeling.

I wonder what this hatred is storing up for years to come. Last night’s TV documentary was an American film that as far as it could, stuck to the evidence about the Ceausescus’ careers and didn’t try to interpret. But I was shocked at the way it all ended, with a hastily convened trial in a back room and summary execution for genocide that had already been decided on by the Romanian generals. The lack of judicial process, including the possibility of appeal, not to mention the indignity with which the couple were treated in the last hours of their lives recalls the terrible treatment of the Romanovs at Yekaterinburg after the Russian Revolution. Of course the crimes of power and privilege against the led should always be called out, named and condemned. But even their worst perpetrators (and Ceausescu was indisputably one of them) have human rights, however much they have denied them to others. And among them is the right to be treated with dignity, which is what due judicial process is designed to safeguard. As to their punishment, I’m not going to comment on that except to say that it wouldn’t surprise me if the far right of the future exploited this history, as the far right in Germany is doing in the case of Hitler, claiming that all was not necessarily as black as it was painted at the time. Romania saw the only violent overthrow of a communist regime in 1989. Therein may have been sewn the seeds of trouble in the future.

Constanta is old Tomis, a very ancient place that became a key port and stronghold in Roman times. Its heritage from antiquity is said to be considerable. But I am not expecting the charmless urban sprawl our coach has to toil through to get to the historic centre, nor, when we get near enough to see it, industry on this scale, including a colossal port complex reminiscent of Calais or Rotterdam. This is Romania’s principal port on the Black Sea, one of the largest in the whole of Europe. As we drive through the suburbs we notice a number of damaged buildings. War damage? someone asks. So our guide reminds us of the deadly earthquake of March 1977 that was felt right across Eastern Europe and that killed more than 1600 people in Romania and Bulgaria. There was another in 1986, less terrible but still resulting in widespread damage. I had not realised that we were venturing into an earthquake zone, so forgetful I become once an event has passed out of the news cycle.

We are decanted from the coach at an open space where great slabs of ashlar and occasional Corinthian columns from the Roman city lie scattered around. It’s no way to treat historical artefacts, but I quite like this casual way of allowing people to wander at will among the relics of their past. Across the square is a nice sculpture of Romulus and Remus being suckled by the she-wolf. Our guide says that citizens here are intensely proud of their classical origins, for “we are not called Romanians for nothing”. We walk down the pleasant pedestrianised Main Street. Pavement bars and cafes are thronged with people of all ages. There is a lively resort feel to this place. But the buildings symbolise the contradictions of Eastern Europe. Fine colonial style architecture sits cheek-by-jowl with brutalist office blocks, apartments and hotels from the Ceausescu era. “It will take generations to put all this right” says our guide. “How do we recreate the loveliness of this historic old town that our parents remember so fondly?”

We enter Ovid Square. The Roman poet was exiled here by Augustus in 8AD, never to return to his homeland. He’d been accused of being implicated, or at least knowing about, a conspiracy to assassinate the emperor. Ovid hated this remote, uncivilised place, this end of the Empire where the Traianic Wall ran into the Black Sea. Coming as we do from the northern edge of Empire with its more famous wall, the liminality of this place carries weight. Ovid is depicted standing in his square, looking out over the Black Sea. So here is where I set eyes on it for the first time. Another sea!  I can’t help thinking of Xenophon’s famous story of the returning Greek mercenaries following their bitter experience of fighting in the Persian Expedition. “The sea, the sea!” they cried, θαλαττα, θαλαττα! as they clambered over a mountain pass. And there it was, there it is, not just any sea but *this* sea, Πόντος Ευξεινος, the “hospitable sea”, so named, presumably, to rob it of the stormy terrors its reputation as the “Black” Sea held. Today it is all hospitality: calm and clear on this hot early summer day, and indisputably blue in contrast to the turbid milky brown of the Danube which we have got used to on our cruise.

We visit the Archaeological Museum which is housed in the former Bishop's Palace. It's an imposing nineteenth century building that would not serve well as a town hall in a proud Yorkshire industrial town like Halifax or Bradford. The treasury contains an absorbing assembly of Roman glass, jewellery and sculpture including the legendary Sea-Serpent of Tomis, this fierce reptile prudently roped off. It’s said to be unique in Roman sculpture, but it’s hard to photograph because of the typed 5” by 3” catalogue card casually propped up against it telling us what it is in Romanian, German and English - but not Russian. That fact suggests how Romania has turned towards the west since 1989. 

Upstairs, noting the fine staircase as we walk up it, there are extensive displays about the early history of Romania, everything displayed in pot-pourri fashion just like old-fashioned provincial museums use to be in my childhood. It’s endearing even if it obscures the story the museum is trying to tell. It’s a bit like a medieval library where books are stored not according to subject but size and available shelving. There’s an impressive array of large amphorae and sculpture from the imperial era. Best of all is a room dedicated to Christian Constanta including decorated stones from Christian burial sites, and the prize exhibit, a fourth or fifth century burial chamber complete with marvellously executed paintings including what appears to be a eucharistic meal, Emmaus-like, on the far wall. It reminds me of Rublev’s famous icon of the Trinity in Moscow. It’s moving to think about the resurrection faith of these early Christians as they looked the grave squarely in the face and demanded, “Where O death is your sting?” It belongs to the same world as the catacomb Christian burials we have seen at Pécs. And there’s something miraculous about it.

On the top floor we reach modern Romanian history, particularly the world wars and the communist era. But I’m absorbed by an exhibition about the construction of the Danube Canal which debauches into the sea here at Constanta at the end of its 64 kilometre journey from Cernavoda where the ship is docked. We have crossed it on the hour’s coach journey here. In the early 1950s, the worst period of Eastern European communism, up to 20000 political prisoners (including the nobility, politicians with incorrect or suspect or undesirable opinions, and clergy) worked on it. It’s thought that several thousand perished. No wonder it’s known as the Canalul Mortii, the canal of death.

This exhibition is their memorial. We see maquettes of men dressed in concentration camp uniform excavating the canal, a typical hovel showing how they lived (i.e. existed) on the site for years on end, and most movingly, large marble tablets on which are listed the names of those who died - hundreds of them, but surely only those whose names are actually known. “Some there be that have no memorial” - some, or more likely, many. Very many. Near the museum is an unpromising modern building housing in situ an immense mosaic from a floor that was excavated on this rich site. Amphorae scattered across it act as a foil for the beautiful patterning. But the building itself is in a sorry state and scarcely does justice either to the artistry of this fabulous exhibit or its conservation. Yes, decades rather than years are what it will need to return Constanta what its history is crying out for.

Passing an immense early twentieth century mosque, we enter the Orthodox Cathedral. Its dark but colourful interior is decorated throughout with beautiful images. We linger inside to watch the faithful of all ages queue up to kiss the icons. As both young and old, single people and families, make the sign of the cross, some of them touching the ground first in memory of their baptism and their mortality, we witness an intense piety at work. Many of them will come here day after day, and however brief their visit, however casual they seem to be as they await their turn, the veneration itself seems all-absorbing. It’s powerful to behold. Priests are on duty in case anyone wants to consult them. One of them goes over to an elderly woman who wants to take a photo of the icon of the Virgin Mary she has just kissed but doesn’t know how to turn her flash off. He helps her, touches her lightly on the shoulder as he hands back her compact. It’s a simple and touching action filled with humanity and Christian courtesy. Outside the Cathedral we find an ancient graveyard with more Roman stones, including one with a Christogram on one side and a primitive cross on another.

The sea front is elegantly designed, complete with the legendary art nouveau casino that is behind metal fencing crumbling away and waiting to be loved. People stroll along enjoying the sunshine. The sea is calm, blue and clear. Children paddle. Kids skateboard. Lovers embrace. We enjoy ice-creams. Above us, cumulus piles up in immense towers. There will be storms again tonight. As we drive into Cernavoda I notice more derelict buildings. One of them, a warehouse whose roof looks as if it could collapse at any moment, carries a sign in English, “Keep out. Seismic threat.”

Blue Danube to Black Sea Day 5: The Dictator’s Capital City

Wednesday 29 May
Overnight we have travelled a hundred miles downstream and crossed over to the Romanian side. We are decanted into our coaches to take us to Bucharest for the day. It’s a beautiful morning with the promise of a hot day to come.

The journey takes an hour. I’m puzzled by my feeling more relaxed on this left bank of the Danube than the right. Perhaps the Romanian landscape feels more familiar to a Western European visitor? Maybe. But I think it’s more to do with the reassurance offered by signs along the road. For we are back in territory where they use the Roman alphabet, and (a big moreover), speak a Romance language. I can begin to make sense of this, or some of it, with my French and Latin. If I were lost or in some kind of predicament in Romania, I could get by (as a last resort speaking French because I’m told that it’s most people’s second language).

I ponder this as we travel into Bucharest, this relief at being back in familiar linguistic territory after these recent days of Hungarian, Serbian and Bulgarian. It helps me realise how fundamentally language forms us, shapes our patterns of thinking and responding. Maybe I shouldn’t say “our”. Perhaps it depends on your feeling for words. Mine, I realise, is fundamental to my identity. It’s not that as a Western European I somehow assume that the west is culturally superior to the east. Romania may speak a Latinate language. “Romania” was the Roman province of conquered Dacia, north of the Danube, where, according to the "continuity" theory of its history, people went on speaking Latin after the Romans departed. But this is the Latin of the eastern Empire not the western, Constantinopolitan rather than Roman. I don’t know enough about the morphology of the western and eastern branches of the romance languages. I doubt that in its details, Romanian has a lot in common with the Gallego I was overhearing in Galicia a couple of weeks ago. But the family likeness will be there. And apart from my own, the languages I know best belong to this family.

On the way our guide, a more elderly man than we’ve had up to now, instructs us in the history, politics and culture of Romania. There is something laboured about his way of speaking, his ability, as someone else puts it, to say interesting things in a dull way. It sounds like a text he is reading from rather than an extempore live talk.  I've heard sermons like this from time to time. I ask someone near the front if I'm right about this, but no, all he has in his hands are a few notes.

We are driven round Bucharest to get a feel for the city. Our first impression is that this is a *real* city with a strong sense of place. It’s a lot bigger than I’d imagined, but the epithet “Paris of the east” is not unjustified. We drive along broad streets and boulevards, and round squares and past grand buildings that Haussmann himself would have been proud of. This city is proud and, on the face of it, prosperous - at least compared to Belgrade a few days ago. The people we see in the streets, not least the children and young people, look affluent and confident. The buildings look to be well cared for. The shops are those you would see in any city in the west. Yellow and white banners deck the streets, for Pope Francis is coming to visit this weekend. What a nice city we are all saying to one another.

Yes I know. That’s a highly superficial judgment. How do you judge a city from a bus? How do you judge a city in a day? We tourists are being shown the capital city its country wants us to see. Tours like these are not so much a showing as a showing off. A hermeneutic of suspicion is needed. Don’t be taken in. Don’t trust appearances. Look behind the scenes, discover what’s real and what could be a Potemkin facade, poke around in the back streets, get out into the suburbs, above all meet its citizens and discover what life is really like here.

The building that prompts these questions is the People’s (aka President’s) Palace of Nikolai Ceausescu. Every tour is obliged to begin here, in front of what is confidently announced to be the largest building in Europe and the second largest in the world, after the Pentagon. We get out of the coach and gawp suitably. But it’s not likeable. A building as monumental as this ought to contribute something to the world’s architectural legacy, something pioneering or beautiful of which it could be proud. This palace adds nothing. The register (rhetoric?) is neo-classical but not in any way that lifts the spirits. It’s merely bloated and ponderous, lacking all the restraint and proportion that’s a hallmark of true art. In short, it’s hubristic, absurd. Indeed, none of the buildings in this plaza or in the mall leading up to it are distinguished. And to achieve this grand projet, a vast area of the historic centre was razed to the ground by its monomaniac begetter.

I turn my back on the Palace and see the big banners on buildings opposite, announcing that Romania is holding the Presidency of the European Union in this first half of 2019. Now that is something to shout about for a nation that only joined the EU little more than a decade ago, yet seems now to be as fervently European as the EU’s founding peoples. I feel not a little tinge of envy for a country riding high as a member state while Britain is preoccupied with leaving the Union.

In Revolution Square we are given a lecture about Ceausescu and the Romanian Revolution. He (with his wife Elena) was one of the most repressive leaders of a Warsaw Pact nation despite having secured popular support initially by condemning the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. His mismanagement of the nation’s finances and the brutality with which his secret police, the Securitate, dealt with dissidents meant that by 1989 no love was lost between ruler and people. During demonstrations in Timisoara in December 1989m the military opened fire on the crowd causing many deaths and injuries. This only fed dissent which by the time it reached Bucharest, and become focused on this square, had begun to be dubbed a revolution. Fleeing the city, Ceausescu and his wife were captured, tried and convicted of economic sabotage and genocide. They were executed by firing squad on Christmas Day. It was the only violent overthrow of a communist regime that year.

The Ceausescu years seem as engraved on the memories of Romanians as the Hungarian Uprising of 1956. In Revolution Square there is a not very prominent memorial tablet in Romanian and English commemorating the Revolutionaries of 1989. Here we are in the country almost 30 years after these events. It hadn’t occurred to me before we set foot in Budapest that the winter of 2019 would no doubt see many commemorations of the 30th anniversary of the liberation of Eastern Europe. It still feels to me as a European to have been a year of wonders. Who will ever forget those scenes on 9 November when people, especially the young, sat astride the Berlin Wall and started tearing it down with bare hands?

We are taken to walk in the old city. Outside a beautiful church, there has been an unpleasant incident. Someone from our party (but in a different group) has had his wallet stolen by a pickpocket inside the church. When we arrive there are eight police officers in attendance asking him questions. It seems that he lost quite a lot of money: 500 euros is mentioned, along with bank cards. It’s ironic that earlier our tour leader had specifically warned us about the risk of carrying money around with us in our back pockets. I feel for this poor couple. It’s a horrid thing to happen on your holiday.

After a drink we head back to Revolution Square to visit the National Gallery of Art. We enjoy the Italian, German and Flemish renaissance paintings. Unfortunately the next floor containing French and Spanish art together with the nineteenth and twentieth century collections is closed today. So we go to the other part of the gallery dedicated to Romanian art. We are prepared to hurry through this quite quickly, imagining rooms filled with enjoyable but not necessarily memorable folk art from Romania’s past and present. Instead we are treated to displays of the highest quality. Especially impressive are the vast galleries dedicated to Romanian church art - icons, crucifixes, church plate, vestments, paintings, sculpture, entire iconostases. It’s an extremely beautiful and well presented exhibition that no visitor to the city who is interested in these things should miss. After this we have little time left to visit the upper galleries that present a comprehensive survey of Romanian art and sculpture from the renaissance to the present day. It seems discourteous to have to leave the gallery after a few enjoyable minutes to rejoin our group and get back on the coach.

We drive for two hours across the sunny Romanian plains and rejoin the ship. Here on the forty fifth latitude, sunshine and colour seem to describe this country that has emerged from terrible times with a positive story to tell about itself as a fully-fledged European state. People who have been to Romania, including two of our children, have spoken warmly of the country and its people. Our visit is bearing that out.

Blue Danube to Black Sea Day 3: The Iron Gates Gorge

Monday 27 May
We have been reminded to put our clocks forward by an hour overnight. We are entering Eastern European Time. The Orient can't be far away. But the capsule we are living in is very much of the privileged west. As, no doubt, will be the perspectives of most of us on board. The question is, how can the sounds and savours of the east begin to penetrate what is in effect a luxury hotel on water? I have to say I have a conscience about the contrast between our lifestyle on board and the simplicity, not to say poverty, of some of the riverine communities we are passing through.

What does it mean to be an ethical tourist in eastern Europe? On this journey I've been reading a book about someone else's Danube journey.* The author, Andrew Eames, is scathing about these cruise ships that bear elderly, affluent, well-fed westerners to these lands in such a way as to keep them inoculated against any real exposure to their cultures. I think there's a degree of envy in that sweeping judgment. But the challenge is important: how to allow travel make me more aware, how to be a voyager with a conscience? I doubt it's the last time I'll entertain these questions.

We awaken to a change of scenery. Gone are the flatlands of Pannonia, the Hungarian Plain that seems to stretch for ever beyond Budapest. Now the river is sneaking through high wooded hills, Romania to the north, Serbia, still, to the south. There is time to enjoy the landscape as it glides by. We have decided that first thing in the morning it will be allowed to sit quietly on our own and not seek out the company of other travellers. We introverts like quiet breakfasts.

But to my right a conversation is going on not about the Danube but about the EU Parliamentary election results that have come through overnight. The general consensus at that table seems to be that the outcome is inconclusive. Everyone is an expert on Brexit these days. I am dismayed to learn that the North East has elected not one but two members of the newborn Brexit Party, which is one more hard Brexiter than before. We sail on midway between an EU member state on one side and a candidate-state on the other. As one state comes in to the Union (or plans to), another comes out (or plans to). What goes round comes round. For the Danube as an EU boundary, substitute the English Channel or the Irish Sea. Only here, where two nations separated by a few hundred yards of water gaze across the EU frontier at one another, the paradoxes of “Europe” seem all the sharper.

Conversations at meal tables tend to be a sharing of travellers’ tales. “Have you ever made one of these river cruises before?” is a standard opener after introductions have been made. This is our third, so we are graduates with plenty to say about the Upper Danube and the Rhine, the relative merits of cruise operators and their ships, their policies on who sits where at dinner. People are less curious about where we come from and hardly at all about who we are and what we have done with our lives. We’ve often remarked on that and wondered why other people are less inquisitive than we are.

Back to the Danube. We are sailing between the Carpathian Mountains to the north and the Balkans to the south. This stretch of the river known as the Kazan Gorge was notoriously dangerous once upon a time, because of the violent rapids and the rocks just below the surface. The Iron Gates barrage was constructed in the early 1970s as a joint hydro-electric project between Romania and Yugoslavia. This created a lake 100 km long upstream, drowning towns and villages in the process. I wish I’d seen the Danube in spate roaring down this defile between the sheer limestone cliffs. But the scenery is dramatic, fjord-like, even if the adrenaline rush, the frisson of navigating treacherous waters has long been a thing of the past.

Along the gorge, just as I’m finishing my scrambled eggs and smoked salmon, we pass a beautiful orthodox monastery, and soon after, the huge (and absurd) stone statue of Decabolos carved into the cliff on the Romanian side. He was the ruler of the Dacians for whose territory the Roman Empire had ambitions because of its valuable gold deposits. In the end, and not without difficulty, Trajan overcame Dacia, creating out of it the only Roman Province north of the Danube, hence the name Romania. I miss seeing Trajan’s memorial on the opposite bank (how could that happen? it's one of the most important antiquities on this journey!), but I have promised him that I shall look out for it on our return next week.

There is much excitement as we enter the Iron Gates lock. It’s two locks actually, because the fall of the river is nearly 40 metres. It is far from being a beautiful sight, but it is intensely interesting to watch this huge engineering achievement at work. And photogenic, as all of us who are photographers are not slow to realise. Most people gather at the ship’s bows, but I find the stern more evocative; maybe in older age I’m tending to look back on where I’ve been rather than forward on where I may be headed, or maybe it’s just an obvious (and less breezy) place for back-row Anglicans like me to linger.

Anyway, peering back into the dark recesses of the empty lock as we leave it strikes me not only as an interesting photographic image, but as an eloquent metaphor of passing through some key stage in life, some rite of passage. My own retirement four years ago comes to mind as we make this transition from one level of engagement to another. It’s a better image than the watershed because in a lock, the river is the same and the waters are the same, yet the retrospect and prospect are markedly different. Up on the hillside above the lock is a large blue tablet with a red star and the name TITO. Serbia looks back to halcyon South Slavic days.

Beyond the lock the scenery flattens out so we go for lunch. At our table is a single passenger who tells us that when she opened her toilet bag on the first morning on board, she realised she had forgotten all her medication. She has nothing but praise for the onboard team, one of whom comes with her into town, takes her to the hospital, translates for her as she explains her condition to a doctor with no English, then drives her to the pharmacy to collect the medication. Luckily she had her prescription with her prescription, something I’m always careful to do too.

We sail on. A stiff breeze has sprung up. Most people have gone inside for shelter but I stay out on deck with my camera. The river is immensely wide now. Even our long ship a full 135 metres from end to end seems dwarfed by all this water. The Danube is languid, no longer the swift mountain stream it was even as far down as Budapest. Behind us the mountains are receding. But we glimpse another line of hills, bluish on the distant horizon. Could it be Transylvania, the romantic "land beyond the woods"?

As I think of Matthew Arnold’s poem ("The Buried Life") about the river as a metaphor of human existence, fast-moving and energetic in its early stages, purposeful and well-paced in its mature middle phase, slow-moving towards the end as it nears the sea - calm and peaceful you could say, or maybe just lazy and listless. Below the Iron Gates, the Danube has become a river in old age. It settles down to its characteristic uneventful landscape setting that we recall from sections of the Upper Danube. But now it goes on and on for mile after mile. Alder, poplar and birch line the river banks, interrupted every now and then by villages, a few industrial towns, and fishermen’s bothies. You could imagine that the Black Sea is just round the next bend. But it’s not. There are more than 500 miles still to travel. This is a river with longevity. Its final senility, that’s to say its loss of identity, its falling apart into different bits of itself as it dissolves in the Danube Delta is a long way off yet.

The day has been warm but overcast with an even whitish light that photographers don't greatly care for. It’s true that the lack of shadows makes the landscape look bland and featureless. But low contrast has possibilities too. On the north bank, quite a distance away, I spot a group of half a dozen trees, with a couple of outliers. The river in front is slightly ruffled in the breeze, so the reflections have interesting textures. I take a series of studies from our open cabin window and am pleased with the results. All light is God’s light, whether it’s sharp and dramatic, or even and low in contrast.

There is a quiz in the lounge tonight. But we’ve had enough socialising for one day. We need time to ourselves for quiet restfulness. We go up on deck to enjoy a radiant sunset. Then back to the cabin to ponder the day's experiences and try to get my thoughts into words while the memories are fresh. 

* Andrew Eames, Blue River, Black Sea: a journey along the Danube into the heart of the New Europe (Black Swan, 2010).