The Danube

by Nick Thorpe

  Already afloat on the dark green waters, Nikita Ivan is seventy, his companion Mitya Alexi sixty-eight. Nikita is unravelling a net the colour of his flowing white beard, and speaks not a word. There's a thin blue rope along the outside edge. Mitya's face is burnt brown by the sun, and his eyes are so narrow when he smiles he might be from the Russian Far East. Both men wear black Cossack caps. No one in the village uses a motor on their boat. They row upriver, sometimes as far as Cernavodă, then let their nets out, weighed down with lead weights, and trawl for fish. What was the biggest sturgeon they ever caught? ‘One hundred and fifty kilos! As we were getting it into the boat, it hit the side with its tail, and knocked my companion clean into the water! I couldn't decide which of them to save!’ he guffaws. Even Nikita permits himself a rare smile at this. Eventually he got both the fish and his companion into the boat, ‘and we rowed back to the village singing all the way!’ Would they sing that song for me, now? Both men look at me as if I am mad. ‘What, during Lent?’ I'm invited back after Easter and promised as many songs as my ears and my heart can bear, and as much fish to eat and brandy to drink as my stomach and brain can cope with. ‘Did that sturgeon make you rich?’ I ask them. Mitya grins. ‘We sold it to the cooperative … for peanuts. In my household, money is like the Danube…’ and he holds his hands up in the air to demonstrate, ‘it … flows through our fingers!’

  On the outcrop of rock which forms a headland above the village, a tall, white Russian Orthodox triple cross stands dramatically on a black marble plinth. Gold letters are embossed against the black background: Kresty tvoemy poklonyaemsya vladiko I svyatoye voskresenie tvoye slavim (‘We worship your Holy Cross, O Lord, and we glorify thy Holy Resurrection’).9 On another side of the plinth, there's the stylised crest of the village, the rising sun, a boat and a bird over the river, and the words ‘In Honour and Respect for our ancestors, the Russian Old Believers who settled in these lands in the name of saving their Pravoslav faith.’ On a third side, ‘In eternal memory of those Russian-Lipovans who fell in the wars, defending the homeland of their ancestors’.

  In the distance, white smoke billows out over the river from the tar-burners’ fire. Black horses graze among the black boats on the shore. On a long island in mid-stream the poplars and willows are still in their bleak winter underwear. A man stumbles out of the village blind drunk to harangue us in Russian and Romanian. But there's no anger with him from my companions for showing this other side of village life, towards the end of a winter that is taking its time to finish. Just a light-hearted acceptance of the bumbling fool, and a concern that he doesn't knock the guest flying into the river far below.

  As I leave, I take a photo of three girls, giggling on a bench outside a house. Apart from the teenage beauty of their faces, the other striking features of the picture are the wavy, delicately wrought iron frames of the fence, the windows and the doors, like a non-figurative painting of the river itself.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Colour of the River

  But the Old European sacred images and symbols were never totally uprooted; these most persistent features in human history were too deeply implanted in the psyche.

  MARIJA GIMBUTAS1

  Alas, we who hoped to lay the foundations of kindness, could not ourselves be kind.

  BERTOLD BRECHT2

  IN THE delta the Danube was green, unwinding like a whole family of snakes from the grey-brown of the winter foliage on its banks. Then upriver it was grey, absorbing and reflecting the March sky and the cities of Galați and Brăila on its banks. In Cernavodă it is black – the name means ‘black water’.

  Two black figures sit on the grass in front of Reactor Hall Zero at the Cernavodă nuclear power station. The woman's right knee is raised, while her left foot is doubled back, under her bottom. Her hands rest delicately on her raised knee, and her oval face looks straight ahead, her eyes slightly raised as though fixed on a point just above the horizon. The pose is both sensual and authoritative. She knows who she is and what she wants. Next to her on the grass sits a male figure on a tiny stool. His elbows rest on his knees, his head is framed in his hands, he gazes straight ahead; unlike his partner, however, he sees nothing but the images inside his own head. He is known as ‘The Thinker’, or ‘The Sorrowful God’, and the female as ‘the Great Goddess of Hamangia’, or, less kindly, ‘the thinker's girlfriend’. The originals are just eleven centimetres tall, made of brown-black burnt clay, and belong to the Romanian National History Museum in Bucharest.3 They were discovered by archaeologists excavating late Neolithic graves in 1956, ahead of work on the canal. Made in about 5000 BC, they have become iconic figures of modern art. A copy has been sent into space, as one of the ten items chosen to represent terrestrial culture to life-forms on other planets. How could Stone Age ‘barbarians’ from early farming communities produce such objects? How did the artist make the move from ‘polishing stone and bone implements’, as that epoch of human history is often described, to finding the leisure to fashion objects like this in his own image? It is the fact that the couple were seated, lost in thought rather than hunting game or grinding meal, that is so powerful. What was the man so sorrowful about? If a vegetation god, was he sad about the state of his creation? And if a man, did he feel already then at the mercy of the whims of the gods? The couple seem so much like us, seven thousand years on.

  ‘Cernavodǎ is famous for two things, these figurines and this nuclear power plant,’ explains the director of the latter, Ionel Bucur, as we head past the couple towards the reactor control room. ‘So we thought we ought to have them here with us.’ Cernavodă is pronounced ‘cherna-voda’ and has the public relations problem of sounding rather like Chernobyl, the nuclear power station in Ukraine that exploded in 1986. So he is at pains to stress the safety of his own operation – the more so since my visit co--incides with the first anniversary of another nuclear disaster, at Fukushima in Japan.

  I have to leave my mobile phone, my camera and my tape-recorder in a locker before entering the reactor building. If I had any chewing gum in my pocket, I would have had to leave that behind too, though polite enquiries fail to reveal why. Two Canadian-designed CANDU reactors here produce 20 per cent of Romania's electricity. They are surprisingly low, squat buildings, more like gas tanks in the rolling hills rippling back from the Danube. Water to cool them is taken straight from the Danube canal, and the water returned to the river through a tunnel and an open channel, 6 degrees Celsius warmer.

  Inside the dark blue painted control room, Ionel Bucur tells me about his professional career. He studied nuclear engineering in Russia in the 1970s, and returned to Romania to build a Soviet-designed VVER on the shores of the River Olt, a tributary of the Danube, but it was not to be. The 1977 earthquake struck almost exactly at the spot where the new power station was to be built. Even dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu's ambitions could not resurrect that project from the ruins. Instead, plans were drawn up for a power station at a different site: Cernavodă. Apart from the Canadian design – a rarity in a half-continent dominated by things Soviet – the project had the additional glory for a nationalist like Ceauşescu that the fuel was home-grown. Uranium would be taken from the mines of Transylvania and converted into heavy water near the Danube at Turnu Severin. It was to be both fuelled by the Danube and cooled by it.

  Nuclear power stations around the world have been forced to reassess their safety procedures in the light of Fukushima. In European Union countries, each reactor has been subjected to stress-tests, to explore potential weaknesses to natural disasters. Cernavodă is just sixteen metres above sea-level. ‘When we built this plant, one of the main safety concerns was flooding from the Danube. But our experience has been rather of years of drought. And that has caused problems for the cooling of the reactors,’ says Bucur. In the summer of 2003, the water level in the Danube sank to almost zero. The reactors had to be shut down for twenty-two days, but they still had to be cooled. Emergency wells were drilled, six hundred metres
deep. That was the summer when unknown wrecks emerged from the river, and archaeologists and bounty hunters scoured the unusually exposed riverbed. It was also when swords, hurled into the waters centuries before to placate the river god, were returned to human hands. What if such summers become the norm, rather than the exception, as the climate of the planet warms up? What if the Danube runs drier and drier?

  ‘We need 105 cubic metres of water a second to cool two reactors. There are big reserves of water here. I'm not worried about that.’

  Bucur has already installed a second set of diesel-powered generators as a back-up power supply in case the lights go out. His main fear is not of an accident, but that there might be less political will, after yet another nuclear disaster, to build two more reactors at Cernavodă on which he has set his heart. I am reminded of the words of a Czech nuclear engineer at Temelin in the soft hills of South Bohemia. ‘Every nuclear power plant is an experiment. As an engineer, I love the challenge of making them work. But as a member of the public, taking into account the enormous risk, I would never allow them to be built.’

  In the Romanian capital Bucharest, I meet Romania's foremost expert on earthquakes, Gheorghe Marmoreanu. His mobile phone buzzes constantly, each buzz a text message reporting another earth tremor somewhere on the planet. He receives more than six thousand such messages a day, which gives the impression that the solid ground under one's feet is in constant, restless motion. But he dismisses fears of a nuclear disaster at Cernavodă. The epicentre of all Romanian earthquakes is Vrancea, in the south-eastern corner of the Carpathian Mountains, he explains. Several kilometres underground, its effects are normally felt far away, not here in Romania. One of his favourite tales is of the baby Pushkin, pushed by his nanny through the grounds of a monastery in Moscow in 1800. Tiles suddenly began falling from the roof of the church, and the quick-witted nanny steered the pram and its precious cargo out on to the open ground. That was the effect of Vrancea, Marmoreanu tells me, with delight, ‘but even that was not enough to rob Russia of a future writer of genius’. In Vienna, the International Atomic Energy Authority has declared that new nuclear plants must be designed to withstand a major earthquake every ten thousand years – double the previous requirement of five thousand. The oval faces of the couple on the grass in Cernavodă gaze into the future, as well as into the past. Seeing and unseeing.

  The Thinker and the Goddess were not alone. The Hamangia culture to which they belong forms a semi-circle, inland from the Black Sea coast, from the Danube delta to Varna in Bulgaria. They belong to a civilisation or span of parallel civilisations that flourished in south-eastern Europe, along the Danube, Prut, Siret, Dnieper, Sava, Drava and Tisza rivers, as far inland as the borders of modern Hungary, from around 6000 to 3500 BC. Together, the civilisations that thrived here are known as ‘Old Europe’, a term coined by the American-Lithuanian archaeologist Marija Gimbutas. This controversial, fiercely feminist archaeologist has dared to suggest that the civilisation was matriarchal, devoted to worship of the mother goddess, and that this was overthrown by patriarchal, Bronze Age invaders from the Russian steppes, north of the Black Sea. ‘They independently discovered the possibility of using copper and gold for ornaments and tools, and even appear to have evolved a rudimentary script. If one defines civilisation as the ability of a given people to adjust to its environment and develop adequate arts, technology, script, and social relationships it is evident that Old Europe achieved a marked degree of success,’ she wrote.4

  That success is not disputed. Huge villages or towns of several thousand inhabitants were built in the Danube valleys, at a time when most other people in Europe were eking out a nomadic existence in little scattered clusters. These settlements were maintained for hundreds of years in the same place. Copper was mined, smelted and used for tools, weapons and jewellery. Gold was produced in small quantities, although few would have been lucky enough to see it. Salt was quarried and transported hundreds of kilometres to allow a constant supply and meat – mostly red deer – and fish were exported up and down river. The people lived in similar sized homes, with no apparent hierarchy in life – only in death, when the grave goods they took with them on their journey to the next world varied considerably. The first physical objects to be traded long-distance were the beautiful pink-white Spondylus – spiny oyster – shells from the Aegean or the Adriatic. These are also found extensively in their graves. The archaeologists John Chapman and Bisserka Gaydarska poetically contrast the luminous effect of the shells with the dark, burnished pottery of the Tripol'ye-Cucuteni culture found on the shores of the Prut, Siret and Dnieper, reminiscent of the full moon shining off the waters of the Danube.5

  The exact relationship of the different peoples to one another, their belief systems and their forms of organisation are the subject of fierce debate. The discussion focuses particularly on the discovery of several thousand tiny, wide-hipped, exquisitely decorated female figurines at sites across the region. Many were found in the sitting position, with tiny thrones or chairs – the Thinker at Cernavodǎ was also portrayed on a small stool. These were central to the matriarchal theory of Marija Gimbutas. She named one such collection of figurines ‘the council of the goddesses’. A younger generation of archaeologists, led by the American Douglass Bailey, has challenged the matriarchal theory, suggesting that there is no proof of this whatsoever, and that such theories have more to do with the feminism of the 1970s or to Lithuanian folklore than to the mysterious pots, jewellery, tools, weapons and settlement plans of the late Stone Age.6 He accuses Marija Gimbutas of leapfrogging millennia, to suggest an unbroken continuity of folk beliefs and religious practices from the late Stone Age to pre-modern times. These were settled peoples with a regular supply of food from agriculture, fishing and hunting, Bailey argues – they had no need to invoke goddesses or gods. Instead he suggests we should look rather at the size of the figures. ‘Contemporary psychological studies have shown that something very odd happens to the human mind when one handles or plays with miniature objects … we enter another world, one in which our perception of time is altered and in which our abilities of concentration are affected.’ The figurines should rather be seen as playthings, easily made and easily discarded, he suggests, telling us more about fashion – the lines on their bodies suggest close fitting tunics, or even body paint – than their beliefs.

  For myself, a stranger following the snaking river inland from the sea, I find much to admire in both approaches, and no real contradiction. But only Gimbutas gives clues to the kind of world which people might have entered as they fingered the figurines.

  The nuclear power station gives Cernavodǎ a modern, nervous, self-important air, with policemen checking cars at the roadside, more expensive hotels than elsewhere in Dobrogea, and electricity pylons marching off impatiently through the vine-clad hills like men with a mission. There are even ladies of easy virtue, dawdling in doorways in a small street near the canal.

  Ionel Bucur might have mentioned a third wonder of the town – the Anghel Saligny Bridge. Saligny was just thirty-three years old when he designed Romania's longest and boldest bridge, to take the new Bucharest to Black Sea railway across the Borcea arm of the Danube. The tender was won against fierce foreign competition, not least from British firms that were already busy laying the country's new railways. On 15 September 1895, twenty thousand people flocked from all over the country to see the opening of this architectural miracle, at four thousand metres the longest steel structure at that time in Europe.7 King Carol I was there in person, with five hundred guests of honour. Would the steel structure hold for its first test? Fifteen heavy locomotives tore over it at eighty kilometres per hour. To prove his unflagging faith in his own creation, Anghel Saligny sat under the bridge in a rowing-boat, calmly smoking his pipe. The bridge held, and the way was open for goods and passenger transport to the Black Sea at Constanța. The bridge is still there, though it has now been bypassed by a less elegant, more utilitarian, creation. The remov
al of the wooden sleepers and the track has stripped it of some of its original glory, but two stone soldiers still stand guard, and there is a statue of the young Saligny himself, triumphant. Underneath, horses graze on the spring grass, next to bush willows along the banks of the Danube, and a lone cow with a bell round its neck, clanking as she munches. A goods train passes slowly, endlessly over the new bridge, bound for the coast, hooting mournfully. Then the sound of the birds swells up again around it, interrupted only by the zag, zag of passing cars. The river is mud brown, ponderous, lost in its own memories. To one side is a long, low building and an enclosure of wooden fence-posts. A herd of sheep, somewhat the worse for wear, fan out across the rivery landscape. If the grass and the foliage were lusher it might have been painted by Turner.

  The Danube canal stretches, straight as a bullet, eastwards towards Constanța, sixty-five kilometres away. First conceived in 1837, it took the brutality of the communist system, its industrialising frenzy and a cheap supply of human lives to get it started in 1949. Up to a hundred thousand men and women worked here, and several tens of thousands died of poor food and medical care, the cruelty of the conditions, and the harshness of winter, before the project was suspended in 1953. The route taken to the coast proved too hard. Today's canal was resumed, along a simpler route, and completed in 1984. In the early 1950s, this was a dumping ground for all social and political opponents of the communist regime, better-off peasants, priests and anyone else the authorities took a dislike to.8 There was little earth-moving equipment, so the inmates had to work with shovels and spades. Elena Sibiscanu was born in 1938, and still lives on the hill near the cemetery, looking down on the Columbia district below. Columbia was one of the most notorious prison colonies. As a child in 1949 she remembers going to play on the cliff overlooking it. ‘After seven or eight in the evening, we would hear the women singing sad songs, on the steps of their barracks. My father used to take bricks and other materials in his cart inside, and he would sometimes smuggle out notes from the prisoners to their relatives. He also used to take cheap cigarettes in for them, though he was strictly forbidden to speak to the prisoners.’