The Danube

by Nick Thorpe

  A barge passes upstream with a load of new cars from the Dacia-Renault factory at Piteşti near Bucharest. Black cormorants sit hook-necked on the wrecks of whole trees left bald by the Danube floods, or flap their heavy wings, flying in straight lines low over the water. Beside them even the seagulls seem small and peaceful. In Hungarian the word for cormorant is kárókatona. Katona means soldier, and káró may come from the Turkish word for black, as in Karaorman, the village in the Danube delta, or Karadeniz, the Black Sea. The Serbian bank here is flat, but the last corner of Romania, on the far side of the Danube, is rich with light green hills, dotted with dark patches of trees.

  Radislav Stokić has been working on the Danube for fifty-five years, and he's not yet finished. He wears a straw hat with a green rim and a green band, and a chequered shirt with a black collar. The boat he has just bought sits silently in the harbour at Ram. It's a barge with a black hull, dark blue amidships, a bridge bristling with aerials, speakers and spotlights, and bright white cabins in the stern, and no name. She is eighty-five metres long and ten metres across. In his seventieth year, Radislav is starting a new line: a gas station, for ships up and down the river between Zemun and Borča. ‘This is the biggest boat I've ever bought. All she needs now is a name, and some fuel tanks.’ He's found a niche in the river fuel market, he reckons. ‘We'll have a crew of three or four, moor her on the side of the river, and get down to business. At the moment there are only three places to fill up on the whole 240 kilometre Serbian stretch of the river, at Belgrade, Novi Sad and Kladovo. His boat is going to fill that niche. He has worked all his life on barges, going up and down river, except for three years in Libya. First with his father, then alone. He knows everything about machinery, about stone quarrying, and about boats. He can't imagine any other life. When the Iron Gates dam was being built, he used to ship stone for it from the quarry at Golubac. ‘We carried the stone for the roads on the shore, and for the dam. We built everything …’ he says. Didn't the dam do a lot of damage? It did, he admits. Especially on the far shore, at Stara Palanka. The river level used to be six metres lower here. A lot of good agricultural land was lost. He and his son are involved in bridge repairs and building now. After NATO bombed the Serbian bridges in the spring of 1999, he got a lot of work rebuilding them. He has two boats with cranes that he hires out, ‘the biggest in Serbia,’ he says proudly. One is 419 tonnes, and especially designed for building bridges. ‘Now we look to the Chinese. Just yesterday I signed a contract with them, for the new terminal in Kostolac.’ The Chinese also have a plan to build a new bridge, right over the Danube. Another firm is bidding for the same work, but he's confident he can win the contract.

  We sit drinking coffee together in a bar in Ram harbour, until the ferry arrives from Palanka – the Javor, a little tug boat, pulling a metal platform across the river with just four or five cars and trucks, and a cluster of passengers. Up on the hill above Ram, the old Ottoman fortress is tucked away behind a row of private houses, with square towers like those at Golubac, but smaller, a hilltop fortress rather than one guarding the shoreline. Some of the windows are fluted, with beautiful brickwork around the inside in the Turkish medieval style. One window opens onto the vast flooded Danube like a keyhole I peep through. The river turns silver in the afternoon sunlight. The barge pushing upriver is a small, black scratch on the all-silver surface. The inside of the fortress is overgrown with grass and wild flowers. The Turks took the key to the keyhole with them, and the Serbs seem unsure what to do with their heritage. On the way back to our guest house in Vinci, I spot the old lady we met on our way, driving the cows down river, up to their bellies in the water.

  The wedding at Smederevo is just getting under way when we walk into Saint George's square. The bride floats across the paving stones, radiant in her white dress, her blonde hair frothing like wheat beer, a tight bodice emphasising her slim figure. Her train is held by three tiny bridesmaids, each prettier than the next. She carries a bouquet of red and white flowers. I'm less sure of the bridegroom. Something about his dark red tie mounted with a brooch, the cut of his suit, the angle of his shoes, and the dark glasses which hide his eyes, makes me feel that this is not a man I would like to buy a used car from. But fortunately I don't have to, and can enjoy his wedding day instead. A gorgeous dark red open-top Jaguar stands ready to sweep the happy couple to their perfect honeymoon. A girl who resembles the bride enough to be her younger sister, her long blonde hair falling over her salmon pink frock, dances to the five-piece Gypsy band. The Gypsies are perfectly turned out in black ironed trousers and matching mauve shirts – a drummer, two horns, and two trumpets. The music is rollicking, like a small boat on a big sea in an Emir Kusturica movie.4 Even one of the pageboys, no more than five years old, is wearing dark glasses. A beggar, his bare feet exposed to reveal toes twisted cruelly upside down, hobbles among the elegant guests, seeking alms. In the doorway of his church, the young priest waits, smiling at first, but increasingly nervous for the pagan revels to end and the service to begin. He fingers a large bronze cross of the sort that used to be thrown into the Danube for the kids to dive for on feast days and win humble prizes. The sun beats down on the square and the Gypsies offer one last rousing chorus, to usher the congregation through the doorway.

  To reach the fortress of Smederevo from the town, you walk towards the river, and cross a maze of rusting railway tracks. My first impression of the fortress is of a row of teeth, from which the middle ones have been knocked out by a powerful blow. That blow came in June 1941, when a vast store of munitions brought in by the German army exploded. Not just the fortress but the whole town was devastated. Shrapnel from the explosion landed up to ten kilometres away, and 2,500 people were killed. The fortress withstood the many sieges of its history better than it withstood the many marriages. The Serbs fought against the Turks at the battle of the Field of Blackbirds in Kosovo in 1389, but with the Turks against the Hungarians at the first battle of Nikopolis seven years later, in 1396. This is conveniently forgotten by Serbian historians, who interpret the Kosovo battle as the beginning of ‘five centuries under the Turkish yoke’. In fact, Serbs, Romanians, Bulgarians and Hungarians fought as often with as against the Turks, as the Ottoman empire expanded into south-eastern Europe. Excellent soldiers, the Turks were initially valued as temporary allies in east European power struggles.5

  Serbia in the early fifteenth century was a buffer state between the powerful Hungarian kingdom to the north and the growing Turkish dominions to the south and east. Smederevo, Ram and Golubac were right on the frontier. In 1403 the Serbian despot Stefan Lazarević became a vassal of the Hungarian king, and received Belgrade from the Hungarians as a reward. In 1426 his successor, Durad Branković, had to hand the city back to the Hungarians, and began to build his new capital at Smederevo. The borders of Serbia have wandered considerably, sometimes as far south as Macedonia, but only since 1918 as far north as Vojvodina, traditionally under Hungarian rule. The fortress was finished in 1439, all twenty-five towers, twenty-five metres high, in a triangular shape at the confluence of the Jezava and Danube.

  Branković's younger daughter Katarina was married to Ulrich II of Celje, a close ally of the Hungarians, at a ceremony within the fortress walls in 1434. A letter from Sultan Murad II arrived soon afterwards, asking for the hand of his elder daughter Mara. It would have been churlish, and probably unwise, to have refused. She set out for Bursa, the then Ottoman capital, the same autumn. That marriage won the Serbs five years of peace. In June 1439 a massive Turkish army, 130,000 strong, attacked Smederevo. But Branković had wasted no efforts in preparation for his sons-in-law, and his fortress initially withstood the attack, despite a Hungarian refusal to come to relieve the siege. However, in August hunger drove the fortress commanders, Branković's sons Grgur and Stefan, to surrender. They were sent to Anatolia and blinded, despite their sister's attempts to save them. The fortress and the two blind princes were returned to Serbia under the terms of the Treaty of S
zeged. In 1449 Branković imprisoned the Hungarian regent János Hunyadi in the dungeons of Smederevo, until his countrymen paid a heavy ransom. Seven years later, Hunyadi came to the aid of the Serbs, and raised the siege of Belgrade from the Turks. Just to keep a foot in all camps, Hunyadi married his own daughter to Mehmed the Conqueror. Marko Kraljević, the Serbian champion of the weak and downtrodden, died in 1395, fighting on the Ottoman side against the Wallachians at the battle of Rovine. The church bells in Hungarian Catholic churches are still rung at noon each day to commemorate Hunyadi's victory (though not his daughter's marriage), at the suggestion of the Pope, who believed Christian Europe had been saved from the Muslim peril. It would be interesting to read a history of this period written from the perspective of these Hungarian and Serb princesses.

  In 1453 Mehmed conquered Constantinople, the last Byzantine bastion. Edirne, to the west, became a centre of drum manufacture for the Ottoman armies marching north to capture the Balkans and eventually Hungary.6

  In 1459 Smederevo fell to the Turks for the last time. A city grew within the three-metre-thick walls, and beyond, and became a major port and centre of trade and intrigue throughout nearly five hundred years of Ottoman rule.

  Down on the shore a young man dressed only in swimming trunks turns his back on the past to angle for catfish and perch – smudj in Serbian – in the broad Danube. He used to work in the steel factory in Smederevo, which employed tens of thousands in communist times, but is now reduced to a few hundred employees. He finds it hard to believe in the latest plans to build an oil refinery here – in competition with Pančevo, just upstream. There's a sense of waiting in the town, and of weddings. The other product for which Smederevo is famous is its grapes. The smederevka grape produces a drinkable wine in its own right, and helped fuel the defeat of the French and Hungarian knights at Nikopolis. But its greatest glory is an indirect one. The ever-busy Durad Branković transplanted vine stock from the gentle slopes above the Danube here to his estates in Tokaj, in eastern Hungary. There they flourished on the volcanic soil to produce the sweet, world famous Tokaj aszú wines, ‘the wine of kings’, which are strongly recommended for wedding nights.7

  The sandstone cliffs at Vinča, between Smederevo and Belgrade, betray little of their importance in European prehistory. Travelling by boat upriver, or on a weekend excursion out of Belgrade, one might be excused for thinking the cliff is mainly there for the use of sand -martins. I climb up a path to the side, over a low fence, into a grassy rectangle with two solid wooden huts. The doors are locked, but through the windows I can just make out fading posters on the wall, a cardboard box on the table. Hammering on the doors and windows elicits the barking of all the dogs of the neighbourhood, but nothing else. I will have to carry on to Belgrade to find an archaeologist who can turn the key in the locked door of the mysteries of Vinča. ‘The people of Vinča appeared so suddenly in the late Neolithic, around 6000 BC, it was as if they stepped off a plane,’ jokes Andrej Starović. ‘And when they left, nearly two thousand years later, it was as if they just got back on that plane, and left without a trace.’ Wherever they came from, they brought the magic art of metalworking with them – certainly of copper, according to the available evidence, but also possibly of gold. ‘In the 1950s, the old professors who discovered Vinča and Lepenski Vir laughed out loud when a young archaeologist, Boris Jovanović, claimed he had found evidence of copper mining at Majdanpek, in eastern Serbia. Fox-holes, they called them.’ But the younger man has been proved correct.

  The Vinča culture also produced magnificent pots, with anthropomorphic lids and shapes, and delicate and sensual figurines. The ceramic figures wear human or animal masks. The eyes are almond-shaped, with protruding noses, and usually no mouth. Some have lines incised on their bodies, suggesting clothing. ‘Fox-like, with raised, elongated, almond-shaped eyes surrounded by incised lines, an exaggerated chin line ending in a pointed snout,’ reads the internet catalogue entry for one figure, ‘and two thick cylindrical horns or ears at the top of the head that have incised cross-bands. A diamond is incised into the brow. A rare type.’8 Some have flattened, spade-shaped heads, with dramatic lines above and below the eyes. There are clay snakes and snake forms inside bowls. Fifteen hundred Vinča settlements have so far been identified, with a population ranging from one hundred to eight hundred in each. Taking an average of two hundred, that would make a total population of 300,000. If the average were four hundred, then the Vinča population was 600,000.9

  Andrej Starović and I sit together in the restaurant of the Travelling Actor guest house in Skadarska, a steep cobbled street which is the nearest Belgrade gets to the smells and tastes of Sarajevo, the Ottoman gift to the Balkans. Andrej looks young for an archaeologist, with his hair tied back in a pony tail, and shoulders that suggest physical strength rather than bookish knowledge. The pots produced by the Vinča people had lids in the form of human and animal faces, with the ears of cats, the eyes of owls, and human noses. ‘When Professor Miloš Vasić excavated Vinča in the 1930s, he assumed that it was a successor civilisation to the Starčevo, on the far bank of the Danube,’ Andrej explains, ‘but in fact they were just neighbours. Vinča's leaders or rulers were the Bill Gates's of their time, because they introduced a completely new technology – metalworking.’ In the early years of the century, Miloš Vasić found so much zinnober, or zinobarite – an ore of mercury – at Vinča, he concluded that it was the centre of a cosmetics industry – that the red was rubbed onto the bodies of the people, onto their clay pots and figurines, and placed in the graves of their dead to symbolise blood, for the afterlife. He also uncovered many ovens, but unlike the ones used to bake bread, or fire pots, these had their floor sloping towards the mouth, and ridges built into the floor, to keep the objects heated inside in place. On Mount Avala, just above Smederevo, Vasić also discovered the seam of zinobarite which the Vinča people must have tapped. Some archaeologists concluded that the extraction of the red powder was not the purpose of the process, but the by-product. What the craftsmen were really after was mercury. And what the mercury was good for was extracting gold. This was dangerous work, because mercury when it evaporates is extremely poisonous. A Croatian archaeologist called Alexander Durrman explained the fact that all representations of people, including the figurines found at Vinča, invariably wear animal masks, and always without mouths. According to Durrman, these were not masks for elaborate religious ceremonies, but for the – equally magical – task of smelting gold. This could also explain the sites of Vinča settlements on the shores of rivers. The tributaries of the Danube, since time immemorial, have run with fine flakes of gold. Almost all Vinča settlements are on the banks of great rivers – not only the Danube but also the Sava, the Tisza and the Morava. This helps explain another of the enigmas of Vinča culture, the almost complete absence of graves. As these were rivers that flooded regularly, forming and eroding islands all the time, most of their graves, with all the grave goods buried within them, must simply have been washed away.

  If gold was the luxury item which the masters of the Vinča people excelled at producing, their everyday metallurgy was the extraction of, and work with, copper. There are several important seams of copper in the mountains of eastern Serbia, notably at Bor, and at Prokuplje. My Atlas of Central Europe10 shows the largest known copper reserves in the whole of eastern Europe in a square of territory that begins just to the east of Belgrade at Ram, stretching all the way through the Iron Gates to Vidin, and to the south as far as the city of Niš. The Copper Age, as the Late Neolithic is known, centred on the main copper seams along the Middle and Lower Danube. While the issue of gold production is still an open question, all experts agree that the Vinča people produced large amounts of copper objects. Not simply in the form of pendants, rings and necklaces, but also as knives, axes and many practical objects. Pločnik, just south-west of Belgrade, appears to have been the main copper workshop of the Vinča culture. The latest laboratory techniques help not only to d
ate objects but also to discover where the minerals used in their manufacture came from. One of the surprises with copper goods from Vinča is that the copper came not from the mountains near Bor, but rather from Mount Kopaonik in southern Serbia, on the border with Kosovo.

  The other important product of the Vinča culture is salt. The salt mine near Tuzla in Bosnia is two hundred kilometres to the west of Vinča. Salt from there may have been brought overland, but was most likely transported on dug-out boats down the Sava river. This is the only edible salt in the whole of the eastern Balkans, the evaporated remains of a lake left behind when the Pannonian Sea receded, sixty million years ago. Another Vinča anomaly is directly connected to salt. ‘From the beginning of the Neolithic in nearly every culture, there is a steady fall in the amount of hunted animals in the people's diet, as the proportion of meat from domesticated animals – pigs, sheep and cattle – rises. But in Vinča, exactly the opposite happens!’ said Andrej. Studies of the bones found in Vinča settlements suggest that the proportion of game, red deer in particular, increased over time. One study shows that a single settlement at Petnica, west of Belgrade, with eight to ten houses supporting around forty to fifty people, produced an astonishing seventeen tonnes of game in one year – far more than they would have needed for their own use. A lot of salt is necessary to preserve meat, although the salt can be reused several times. With the help of the salt from Tuzla, the meat was traded hundreds of kilometres up and down the Danube, Sava, Morava, and Tisza rivers. Pločnik covered 120 hectares, and supported a population of up to five thousand – one of the biggest settlements in the whole of Europe at that time. The north of the area was completely given over to copper-smelting ovens – like an industrial estate on the edge of a modern city. The technology used to hunt and kill the deer is easily traced. There were three main sources of obsidian flint in Europe in the Copper Age: the island of Milos in the Aegean, the hill at Tokaj in Hungary and the island of Lipari off Sicily.11 Modern dating techniques study the strontium particles in flint, which vary in the natural rock in each of the three sites. Each obsidian arrowhead can now be traced back, at the laboratory of nuclear physics in the Buda hills in Hungary, to one of those three sites. And the Vinča arrowheads studied so far all came from Tokaj in Hungary, four hundred kilometres away, first down the Tisza, then the Danube. Salted red deer killed in the hills overlooking the Danube were traded for more obsidian flint, to hunt more deer.