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).

Blue Danube to Black Sea Day 2: A City of the South Slavs

Sunday 26 May
In Serbia. We arrive in Belgrade at lunch time. "One of the ugliest cities imaginable" - Beattie quoting another traveller's description. We shall see. There is a lot of bad-tempered shouting between ship crew and ground-staff as the boat docks, maybe because we have moored alongside another ship that resents our presence. I feel haunted by the history of this country and the havoc it has wrought in Europe.

Why don’t I feel the same about Germany? Perhaps I should. Maybe the Germans have demonstrated a capacity for self-reflection in the aftermath of war that enables it to move on. I don’t know enough about Serbia to be able to say, but the fact is that whereas we talk glibly about peace having lasted in Europe since 1945, this corner of the continent saw terrible conflict only a quarter of a century ago. On our way back upstream, we shall stop at Vukovar in Croatia which suffered dreadfully at the frontline of the Balkan war. I hope some of this history is communicated as we visit these lands that still represent active fault-lines in the political and cultural crust of this continent. Serbia is a candidate for EU membership. That has to hold out some hope for south-east Europe.

We are taken for a coach tour of the city. We are shown public buildings, sports stadia and blocks of flats that are displayed with a pride that seems to hark back to the communist era. Our guide takes particular pride in the huge building that hosted the first meeting of the non-aligned countries of the world, i.e. those that were members neither of NATO or the Warsaw Pact. The coach stops reverentially in front of President Tito’s mansion and we are treated to a lecture about the virtues of Yugoslavia’s legendary leader. The nation was not like any other in Eastern Europe, we are reminded. Yugoslavia kept doors open to good relationships across the world, east and west. You can’t help concluding that she believes the idea of Yugoslavia, the land of the South Slavs, was a Good Thing and what followed its collapse was, apart from Serbia of course, a degree of disintegration that was to be regretted.

We visit the Basilica of St Sava. This enormous church, gleaming white in the sunshine, was begun 80 years ago and is still not finished. It is closed at present because of work being done to complete the mosaics on the vault. But the crypt is open so down we go. It’s remarkable. I won’t say beautiful, but it is reminiscent of those amazing underground stations I recall seeing on the Moscow metro system complete with chandeliers blazing with light. The crowds of tourists add to the feeling of a tube station at rush hour. Our guide oozes enthusiasm for what is being achieved here. But it leaves me unmoved. It feels more like a shrine to Serbian pride than a temple of God. Much more memorable is the city’s cathedral which we visit later, a serious and beautiful place where people are doing what these places are meant for: lighting candles, kissing icons and engrossed in their prayers. Compared with the over-lit crypt, this church is dark and mysterious as Orthodox churches should be. “Churches are best to pray in that have least light.”


Then we are taken up to the Kalemegdan Fortress that dominated the prospect of Belgrade as the ship drew in. It guards the confluence of the Rivers Sava and Danube rather like Koblenz or Lyon, both of them also cities built at the meeting of two rivers. The Romans had a fort here called Singidunum, a name that reminds me of Segedunum, Wallsend, in our native North East. They are separated by more than 1500 miles, yet they both belong to the northern frontier of the Roman Empire. Trajan stationed a fleet below the hill on the Danube. It offers food for thought on what the book calls “the grandeur that was Rome”.

The fortress is impressive, and lively on this summer Sunday afternoon. There are festivities going on in the enclosure, there is live music and the park is thronged with young people and families enjoying a day out. At the summit our guide instructs us in the history of Serbia while we look out across the rivers. This is perhaps the one quarter of Belgrade that is genuinely beautiful, where the charm of this ancient settlement has survived the brutalising effects of the ubiquitous architecture of social realism whose character and scale seem without charm, without respect to the human beings who have to inhabit these grim buildings and public spaces.

I have to say that at first impression, Belgrade, in the parlance of the Michelin guides, is “worth seeing” rather than “worth going to see”. Would I change that assessment if I came here to stay for a week? Who knows. On a cruise, I need to be careful about making hasty judgments. We dip in and out of so many different experiences, none of them immersive or sustained for very long except that of being on the river itself. No one is going to list Belgrade among Europe’s top ten capital cities. But it’s good that a cruise like this doesn’t avoid places that are hardly easy on the eye, and indeed have challenging histories. I shall be glad to be able to say that we came here.