The Danube

by Nick Thorpe

  CHAPTER 10

  Smoke, Ash and a Tale or Two

  Constantly bring to thy recollection those who have complained greatly about anything, those who have been most conspicuous by the greatest fame or misfortunes or enmities or fortunes of any kind: then think where are they all now? Smoke and ash and a tale, or not even a tale.

  MARCUS AURELIUS, Meditations, Book XII1

  THE 07:56 intercity train from Budapest reaches Pécs in the south of the country, close to the Croatian border, at 10.32. Then there are two short hops, first to Villány, famous for its red wines, then to Mohács, arriving at 12.15. It's September, and my journey up the Danube has arrived at an interesting stage. I've reached the country which has been my home for half my lifetime: Hungary. I've decided to travel this leg of the journey by bicycle, to get a new perspective on a country whose language I speak and which I think I know well.

  Sheep all face the same way in a meadow, watched over by a lone shepherd. No fields in an English sense, with hedges, gates and a stile, exist in eastern Europe. In Hungary and Romania, Bulgaria and Serbia, there is always a shepherd with the sheep, guiding them to the best grass, and home again at the end of the day. The sheep face the same way, into the wind, because they like the feel of the breeze on their faces. They remind me of boats at their moorings in a sheltered harbour, swinging head to wind. The early morning sunlight catches their wool from behind, as though each has a halo.

  There are only a few passengers on the red, two-wagon train that carries me into Mohács – Gypsy lads and old ladies – the story of the Hungarian countryside. The young people leave for work in the cities. The men die young, worn out by a life in the fields and by a diet of pork and brandy. The Roma scrape a living, mostly on welfare, dying ten years earlier than their fellow Hungarian citizens. The post office has shut down. The village school closed long ago. The old ladies, kept alive by their love of flowers and comforted in their loneliness by the constant buzz of the television, share the villages with the Roma. The poorest of the poor, Roma or non-Roma alike, sometimes steal to survive. The village shop, if there still is one, sells white bread, sugar, oil, flour, cigarettes, sour cream, twelve different kinds of salami and some rather sad looking potatoes. My chosen country in the twenty-first century. But everyone has a story to tell. Much has happened since the battle of Mohács.

  The town of Mohács is five or six kilometres from the site of the battle. A woman in the town museum lets me leave my bicycle, laden with panniers, inside the building. Mohács seems to be a city of kind women. The museum is named after Dorottya Kanizsai, who set out for the battlefield in search of her stepson, the young bishop Ferenc Perényi, after the disaster of 1526, and with the help of local priests and several hundred peasants, buried him and thousands of other fallen Hungarian soldiers in a mass grave – the mound at the centre of the monument today.2 In a painting of the scene from 1860 by Sóma Orlai Petrics, Dorottya is portrayed cradling the head of the dead man in her arms, amid the desolation of the battlefield.3 The silver Danube snakes away into the distance, under a thunderous sky.

  There are black ceramic pots on display, the speciality of local Slovenes. These were once taken down the Danube from here and across the sea to Constantinople – black pots across the Black Sea. Hungarian potters made brown pots flecked with yellow, yellow with green. The Croats were the wood-carvers. There are also blouses and skirts from the traditional costumes of the various nations of southern Hungary – Slovenes and Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims), Serbs and Croats. On show is a sleeveless leather jacket of the Šokac people, who live on the border with Croatia, decorated with yellow, blue, black, purple, red and pink flowers with a red leather binding round the edges. The Bosniak woman's waistcoat beside it is less crowded with flowers, but equally fine. There are zigzags of lace, and lines of yellow and red, embroidered on a brown background. In addition, the museum sports tablecloths of fine woven hemp, bedding and embroidered cushions, and magnificent chests, one painted deep blue and decorated with flowers, another of hewn wood, decorated with black waves, moons and stars. Painted furniture became popular in the mid-nineteenth century. In the graveyards, the stone or cross betrays the age and gender of the dead. A young girl's grave was decorated with two headscarves when she was first buried. These were later given as gifts to the priest.

  The ferry across the river goes every half hour. I eat fish soup at the Révkapu (Ferry Gate) restaurant, which is run by a Roma man and his son. The soup swims with fat chunks of carp, its skin, fishbone and fish-eggs, but the flavour is good, and the paprika in the soup gives it colour and edge. There's a September feeling in the air; the other diners on the terrace bask in the last heat of summer. I feel sleepy after my meal, but the journey ahead is long and I'm on my own. On the way across the water, the ferryman rebuffs my attempts at conversation – he's a taciturn fellow. Apart from the defeat of 1526, and a revenge victory in the return battle in 1687, Mohács is famous for its annual Busó festival. People dress up in sheepskins and wooden masks with animal horns – busós – and parade through the streets. The festival commemorates a raid across the Danube by masked locals, which scared the living daylights out of the Turkish garrison. They fled, according to the story, leaving the town in Hungarian hands.

  I reach the far bank and strike out upriver, along the dyke. The bicycle path is part of European Route 6, which crosses Europe all the way from St Nazaire at the mouth of the Loire to Tulcea in the Danube delta, following the Loire, the Rhine and the Danube.4 It's already three o'clock in the afternoon. I'm constantly distracted by the river, wheeling my bike down on to the shore, to paddle or skim stones. I've travelled much of the route so far on the right, southern bank of the river. But I want to travel as far as Budapest on the left, the eastern bank – among the ‘barbarians’. Long-distance cyclists pass, always downstream. Sometimes we stop and talk: a Swiss couple from Zurich, going as far as Osijek; a British couple heading all the way from St Malo on the Normandy coast to Constanța, nearly three thousand kilometres. They brought too much gear, and have just posted their tent back to Britain. They're full of the dreams of an Indian summer, twenty kilos lighter. How dangerous are the stray dogs in Romania? Is it true they attack cyclists without warning? Is there somewhere good to stay in Vukovar?

  There is no obvious gradient, but I feel I'm cycling uphill all the way. The prevailing north-westerly wind blows in my face. I'm cycling on an old city bike, at least thirty years old, the gift of a German neighbour. I'm afraid the thin, narrow tyres will puncture on the sharp gravel, but at least I've brought mercifully little luggage. I want to cover the 220 kilometres to Budapest in five days.

  The defeat of its army in 1526 was a disaster for Hungary, but a blessing for Austria. The Crown of Saint Stephen, which had been presented to the Hungarian king in the year 1000 by Pope Sylvester when the country converted en masse to Christianity, now passed to the Habsburg dynasty, which took over Hungary's role as ‘the last bastion of Christian Europe’. But Ferdinand, the Habsburg claimant to the throne, was challenged by János Szapolyai, who arrived too late at Mohács to save King Lajos. Szapolyai was now recognised by the Ottomans as the rightful king. Both were crowned by their respective patrons, and the scene was set for 150 years of wars and skirmishes between the two empires on Hungarian territory, which laid waste the countryside.5

  This period is depicted in most Hungarian textbooks as one of uninterrupted exploitation by the Turks, which is largely the legacy of nineteenth-century, fiercely anti-Turkish, historians such as Gyula Szekfű. ‘We may search in vain for the positive effects of Turkish rule. We are talking about two opposing cultures, whose natural relationship is one of conflict,’ Szekfű wrote. ‘The Turkish slave state seized victory while the traces of Hungarian European civilization were wiped out.’6

  The real picture is more nuanced, according to Géza Dávid of the University of Budapest, working from his own research and that of another historian, Gábor Ágoston.7 The sudden fall in the
population of one parish was often matched by the sudden increase in the population of another. The main threat to life, he argues, was not Turkish oppression, but disease, especially the plague. And when people fled, they rarely crossed from Turkish into Austrian-occupied Hungary, although they could easily have done so as the borders were blurred and porous. Those in Turkish-occupied Hungary may have been more comfortable than those in the Austrian occupied part. The deforestation of the country was caused as much by the building needs of Christian as of Muslim armies. The positives include the many steam baths, and the introduction of paprika and various other vegetables, as well as tree varieties such as the sweet chestnut, the seeds of which were brought up the Danube.

  At Dunafalva I talk to a lady waiting for the little passenger ferry with a big basket of freshly gathered tomatoes. She lives in Dunaszekcső on the far side, and comes over each day to water and pick her vegetables. She also owns vines on the far side, in the sandy, loess soil near the old Roman camp, and produces white wine, which I should come and savour if ever I'm passing on the other bank, she says. I'm tempted to cross on the ferry with her, but then I will not reach Baja by nightfall. A group of six schoolchildren, weighed down with satchels, wait for the ferry beside her. Not a bad journey to school and back each day, across the river. The Armaris, a Dutch barge, passes upstream, close in to the far bank, the compulsory car parked on the stern.

  Dunaszekcső is famous for a handsome bronze bust of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius unearthed here. On display in the museum in Pécs it shows the emperor well-bearded and curly-haired, less the philo-sopher king than the military commander, called away from Rome to face the first attacks by Germanic tribes across the Danube. The bust was probably made in his honour, just before his visit, on the warpath. He spent the years from AD 167 until his death in Vindobona (Vienna) in AD 180, driving back a succession of invasions by the Marcomanni, the Quadi, the Iazygians and other tribes. These were the first waves of a tribal tide that would eventually wear down and overwhelm the Roman empire. But for another two hundred years the Romans held their own along the Limes frontier, reinforced their fortresses along the river, and extracted a high price for the burning of their forts and the killing of their men. The Meditations, for which the Stoic emperor is most admired, were begun in 167, as Marcus Aurelius reluctantly gave up his sedentary life, resolving the quarrels of his fellow citizens, to confront their fiercest foes. ‘Time is like a river made up of the events which happen, and a violent stream; for as soon as a thing has been seen, it is carried away, and another comes in its place, and this will be carried away too.’8 His stoicism, his single-minded sense of duty and purpose, are tinged with the melancholy of a man far from home. Only four of the thirteen children his wife Faustina gave birth to survived beyond childhood. I imagine him high on a wooden tower, being hastily reinforced with stone, gazing down into the brown-grey Danube.

  Just before the village of Szeremle I hear the sheep before I see them – all five hundred of them, clanking their bells as they shuffle between the dyke and the wooded shores of the river. It's easy to stop on a bike, travelling long distance, to waylay people I like the look of. Sanyi the shepherd lives on his own in a house tucked away in the elbow of the dyke. The sheep are owned by a man in Szeremle who has a farm – the white buildings we can see on the horizon. The farmer split up with his wife, Sanyi tells me, and lost everything – he used to have more than two thousand sheep, worth seventy US dollars each, but these are all he has left. The shepherd sighs, full of sympathy for his master's plight. We offer each other water, and he offers me his hand rolled cigarettes. Then he tells me his life story.

  ‘You can live well here from your own produce – a few pigs, egg-laying hens, and vegetables from your own garden.’ He tried living in a town once, he says, but couldn't stand it – ‘you can't raise animals in the city; someone would report you!’ His wife was killed by a train in 1995. His children are grown up and live in Pécs. He visits them, and likes to see his grandchildren, but is always glad to get home. His face is dark from the sun and the rain. He might be Roma, but it doesn't seem important to ask. He's interested in my journey, impressed that someone would bother to cycle all the way to the capital. ‘I've walked my own share of long distances,’ he says. ‘When I broke up with a girlfriend once, I set out on foot from Harkány, and walked all the way to Pécs’ – a hundred kilometres or so. He remembers a ‘foreign couple’, who pitched their tent between the dyke and a field of corn. ‘I came over the ridge in the early morning, with all my sheep. They were shouting, I was shouting, but the sheep couldn't help it – they trampled right through them!’ He shakes with laughter as he tells the story. ‘There are fewer mosquitoes this year, and that's a blessing. Some years they are terrible. But we need rain desperately. The sheep have nothing to feed on! Just look at them!’ I watch his animals, nosing around in the yellow grass. I have the impression that I am the first person who has spoken to him for weeks.

  In Szeremle there's a pond where the croaking of the frogs sounds like thunder. Wild apples grow from trees along the way. Another shepherd, Jóska, tends seventy sheep of his own. He worries about the weather, too. ‘It hasn't rained here for six weeks.’ He sells the lambs to the Italians at two to three weeks old, weighing twenty kilos. They are transported live to Italy for slaughter.

  In Baja I find a small hotel for the night, proud of my progress. Only thirty-two kilometres from Mohács, my legs and back ache, and my eyes are dazzled by the sun and wind. After a shower, I walk gingerly through the town to Petőfi Island in search of supper. From the terrace of the Vizafogó (Sturgeon Catcher's) restaurant, overlooking the Sugovica, I watch the orange lights of the town come on, and the stars grow brighter over the Danube. Through the glass window, on television, Hungary is playing Moldova at soccer. The waiter brings regular reports of the score, with each glass of wine or plate. The final tally is 2–0 to Hungary, a great victory.

  The hero of Baja is István Türr, just as the heroine of Mohács was Dorottya Kanizsai. Down on the Danube shore, the István Türr lookout tower boasts a plaque at the entrance. ‘This stone is dedicated to István Türr; the Austrian army officer sentenced to death; commander of the Hungarian Piedmont legion; the volunteer in the Baden, Turkish and scout wars; one of the immortal one thousand of Marsalai; Garibaldi's general; the general of the governor of Naples Victor Emmanuel; the brave soldier in every battle. Who fought on foreign fields, under foreign flags, for the honour of the Hungarian sword, and for the glory of the town of his birth.’ A second stone table extols Türr's other peacetime virtues: the initiator of the Ferenc József and Baja canals, ‘champion of the idea of the Panama canal, champion of public education, and of peace between nations’. Something of an all-rounder, then. At the top of the tower, hundreds of padlocks, engraved with the names of lovers and sometimes whole families, have been attached to the railings, and their keys thrown into the Danube. Valerie and Ludovic, Márti and Laci, Fernanda and Tamás, all linked with hand-carved hearts. The bottom of the river here must be thick with keys, the sediment of love.

  The next morning Éva Kis shows me round the István Türr museum, which is dedicated to fishing and other Danube-based pursuits. The nets are fine and delicate, like the lingerie of a river goddess. As nubile as Danubia? Why did the Romans insist on the whiskery Danubius?

  The csontos kece is a three-part net ringed with cow bones, designed to be hauled along the riverbed. The bones are just right for this purpose, strong, yet light enough to bounce over the obstacles and scrape through the gravel on the bottom of the river without getting heavy and waterlogged, like wood. There are mirror nets, now banned for animal rights reasons as the fish suffer so much in them when they are caught; huge nets resembling women skirts, requiring great strength and skill to throw out into the water. And a black-and-white photograph of a young man doing so, watched with uninhibited interest by three girls who have paused from their task of cleaning fish. A large beluga sturgeon,
about three metres long and preserved in a case, is in a place of honour near the entrance, its four huge whiskers poking down from below its nose like skewers, its face viewed from the side strangely human, like a caricature of a whiskery man with a carnival nose. On the wall is a medieval illustration explaining how sturgeon were caught – not with the garda, the fences of the Lower Danube, but with a stout rope, held right across the river bed, from bank to bank, with wicked-looking hooks dangling from it, each weighed down with a lead ball. As the sturgeon migrated upriver, staying close to the bottom, these hooks would catch in their sides and, when the rope was hauled up, the fish could be caught and eventually landed. In this picture, the fish is several times longer than the boat. ‘When the children see this one,’ says my guide, pointing to the great preserved fish, ‘they think it's a shark.’ Big barbed hooks are displayed along the wall, and there's a price list from 1746: twelve forints for sturgeon, two forints for catfish, one and a half for carp. The sturgeon catch for six parishes in the Kalocsa bishopric is listed for the same year: 10,000 kilos in the spring, 11,000 kilos in the autumn.

  Another part of the exhibition deals with the traditional water mills on the Danube. Baja was especially favoured because of the strong current, close to six kilometres per hour. There are scale models and drawings of the mills, which were made from two boats, moored together like the hulls of a catamaran, one substantially larger than the other. Between the two, a large water wheel with paddles is suspended that was turned by the current where the boat was moored, to turn the mill in the larger of the two boats. There are also models of the grain boats that were pulled upriver along the tow path by teams of horses, to take grain to the mill-boats. Each is decorated with bowsprits, which resemble neither the goddesses of the Greeks nor the dragons of the Chinese, but the head of the chello of the Hungarians – ever a musical nation.