Against the Flow

by Tom Fort

  When Grigore first came to fish the delta, in the 1970s, that was pretty much how it was. He was up at 3 a.m. to meet his Lipovan boatman who then rowed for three or four hours to get to the place (and three or four hours back). One year Grigore brought with him an outboard engine that he himself had adapted from a petrol-driven wood-saw. Unwittingly he thus became one of the pioneers of the mechanical revolution that swept away the old, very slow, very arduous order so that when my turn finally came, I had to recompose my mental picture fast. The silent rowing boat was supplanted by Grigore’s and Toti’s jointly owned pride and joy, a gleaming white 20-foot craft powered by a 60-hp engine capable of skimming the water at 30 kilometres an hour; which was not part of the original scheme at all.

  The petrol-driven engine destroyed for ever the delta’s most potent quality: its silence. But at the same time it’s worth recalling that the peace that still reigned when Grigore started coming was more the peace of the hospital ward than that of a pristine wetland wilderness. The process of taming the delta that had begun with every virtuous intention a century and a half before had eventually brought it to its knees.

  The Lipovan exiles from Russia arrived here around the middle of the eighteenth century, and for a long while were left to their own devices. They learned the habits of the fish, particularly the migrating sturgeon. They built slim boats with shallow draughts to ease their way along the silty channels. Fishing was the main business but they hunted birds and animals as well, and built villages on the few spits of dry land, where they kept animals and fowls and grew crops and fruit trees. The water was their element and they were attuned to the delta’s secret, shifting ways. No one bothered them. To the west, wars raged, dynasties were forged and toppled, the flames of rebellion were fanned and brutally doused, alliances were made and broken, territories were conquered, borders were redrawn, kings were crowned, deposed, assassinated. None of it made much difference to the Lipovans. They stayed loyal to their ancient Russian liturgy, bowing to the floor and crossing themselves with two fingers; and they kept laying their nets.

  But it was inevitable that in the Europe that emerged from the ruins left by the Napoleonic Wars, the potential of the Danube would arouse interest. The river reached from the heart of Europe to the Black Sea. The Black Sea offered a route to the Bosphorus, and the Bosphorus to the trading world beyond.

  In Budapest Count István Széchenyi looked across its waters and decided to make it his business to subdue the river so that it might serve the rebirth of the Magyar nation. Between 1830 and 1846 Széchenyi made ten journeys up and down the Danube, some lasting months, accompanied by engineers, potential investors, fellow visionaries and a fair number of tourists. His mission was to persuade anyone prepared to give him a hearing – in England he bent the ears of the Duke of Wellington, Palmerston, Sir Robert Peel and Lord Grey, among others – that the conversion of the Danube into a major east–west trade route would have a dynamic effect on the economies of the whole continent. Among much else, Széchenyi supervised the blasting of a way through the rapids and cataracts of the Danube’s most notorious blackspot, the Iron Gates near Orşova.

  Much was accomplished, and Széchenyi’s Danube Steamship Company worked the river regularly – if not very profitably – between Linz in Austria and Galati in Romania, the last river port before the delta. But the grand vision of a Danube trade route foundered at the delta. Below Galati the river split into a web of tortuous channels as it sought the sea, none of which could be relied upon to take cargo vessels. From one year to the next they would change course or silt up to the point of being impassable. A single storm in the Black Sea could pile up enough sand to block the way through entirely.

  In the 1840s Britain – the world leader in this kind of enterprise – sent a Royal Navy survey team to assess what should be done to address this deplorable situation. The team looked at the three principal channels: Chilia to the north, Sfântu Gheorghe to the south, Sulina in the middle. Sir Henry Trotter of the Admiralty reported to Parliament on what they found as they approached the mouth of the Sulina channel:

  … a wild, open seaboard strewed with wrecks, the masts of which, sticking out of the submerged sandbanks, gave to the mariners the only guide to where the deepest channel was to be found; while the banks of the river were only indicated by clusters of wretched hovels built on poles, and by narrow patches skirted by tall reeds, the only vegetable product of the vast swamp beyond …

  Nothing daunted, the Admiralty recommended that the Sulina channel offered the best prospect. Over the next 20 years it was dredged, embanked, straightened and significantly shortened. Sulina itself – hitherto a decayed, lawless outpost of the Ottoman Empire – became the Black Sea port. The project was a co-operative venture by the European powers, and a pan-European Commission was established to oversee the commercial development of the river. It set up its headquarters in the inland port of Galati, where the presence of the Commissioners and their families bestowed on the town a prosperity and cosmopolitan gentility not found elsewhere in the region. There were parties, musical soirées, visits to the best addresses, and excursions into the countryside to inspect the curious customs of the natives and down to the delta to look at nature.

  But despite the Commission and the great investment, the Danube trade never flourished as pioneers such as Széchenyi had envisaged. The river was too long. It passed through too many countries that were too inclined, at difficult moments, to put their own narrow interests before the common good. And, for all the efforts to tame the river, it remained too unruly. Most winters saw floods that made long stretches unnavigable for weeks. Even at times of normal flow the upstream passage was agonisingly slow for the big barges, which in places had to be towed from the bank by locomotives. At its height the volume of goods shipped on the Danube was less than a fifth of that on the Rhine.

  But the endeavour was not abandoned, and the Danube Commission continued to wave the flag of co-operation between nations until that ideal itself fell face down in the dust in 1939. Thereafter a new imperative held sway. Romania and Yugoslavia’s Communist leaders clasped each other in comradely bear-hugs and agreed to pool resources in order to harness the power of the Danube at the Iron Gates. In 1972 the dam across the gorge and its two attendant hydro-electric plants were opened. One of Europe’s most dramatic natural wonders was lost for ever, as was the island of Ada Kaleh, the famous walled Turkish enclave with its mosque and web of twisting alleys.

  By then Ceauşescu was running things in Bucharest, and in time he turned his attention to the delta.

  We launched Grigore and Toti’s boat from a slipway at the edge of Tulcea, a little way downstream from where the Chilia channel splits off to the north and just above the separation of the Sulina and Sfântu Gheorghe channels. Mrs Ethel Greening Pantazzi, the American wife of one of the Danube Commissioners stationed in Galati in the period before the First World War, left a charming picture of Tulcea then: ‘with its quaint windmills slowly turning their wide brown wings on the hillsides … the slender minarets side by side with the round church domes’. The mosque and the church are still there, and apparently some Turks as well. But the windmills have long gone, and the quaintness and charm have been submerged beneath the racket and disorder inescapable in every Romanian town and city.

  The waterfront at Tulcea churned with activity. A rusting ferry, weighed down by trucks and cars, was heaved by a smoky tub of a tug in an arduous arc to the far bank. Towering Russian and Turkish cargo ships cleaved downriver, bound for Sulina, sirens booming. Barges heaped with sand and gravel, bristling with scrap metal and machinery, crept towards their berths. Past casualties of the river trade – barges, stubby coasters, derelict pleasure boats – lay abandoned on the mudbanks between the jetties and wharves, like drunks suddenly overtaken by the urge to sleep. Multitudes of smaller craft – launches, inflatables, dinghies – cut angles across the water, engines buzzing and growling.

  As the elder brother, it was
Grigore’s privilege to steer us out of Tulcea. Subsequently he and Toti shared the wheel, and neither I nor Toti’s daughter Ada – who completed our quartet – was ever invited to take a turn. Ada, who was slim and strong and outdoorsy, was put in charge of the anchor. I made no useful contribution to the management of the boat.

  Grigore at the wheel

  With the aid of a brisk current we headed seawards, the twin propellers ploughing deep, curving furrows behind us. There were anglers everywhere: in boats tucked into the reeds, or stationed on the banks where there was shade from the ferocious sun. Far away a flock of pelicans wheeled against the blue sky like a handful of black and silver buttons thrown towards the sun. Through my binoculars I fixed on three eagles swaying on the thermals. The cormorants watched us, unmoving, from their stations in the trees, but the herons retreated with heavy flaps of their wings as we approached.

  No vermin-infested shack awaited us but a well-appointed pension on the waterfront at Crişan, the last major settlement on the Sulina channel before Sulina itself. The address of the pension was 57, which sufficed, as there was only the one street, extending the six-kilometre length of the village. Since no road runs to Crişan from anywhere else, there is no traffic to watch out for except bicycles, the odd scooter and the occasional horse. Number 57 was roughly in the middle, a ten-minute walk from the hub of the settlement which consisted of the one bar/restaurant and the one shop. Crişan was bounded to the front by the channel, here about 250 yards wide, and behind by a few fields, grazed by horses and cattle, and a wetland of bog and reedy, weedy ponds from which, soon after the fall of darkness, a tremendous massed chorus of frogs burst forth as suddenly as if someone had flicked a switch.

  But Crişan was no hick backwater. The channel was as busy as any well-used through road, and the village was growing fast. The old houses – single-storey wooden structures with verandahs and reed-thatched roofs – had originally each been allocated land for orchards and vegetable plots and a paddock for the beasts. These gaps were being rapidly filled by two- and three-storey holiday houses and pensions, to cater for the swelling tide of visitors.

  Instead of a beaten mud floor, a palliasse and an oil-lamp, I had a room to myself with en-suite shower and lavatory, and a little balcony from which to listen to the frogs. The dining-room was downstairs, where the proprietor – an incomer from Bucharest – swapped fishing tales with Grigore and Toti while his wife served fried eggs and sausage for breakfast, and chicken or catfish steaks with boiled potatoes for supper. There was a verandah at the back, cluttered with fishing tackle where the fishermen gathered to discuss fortunes and prospects. In front, on the other side of the street, was a landing-stage where, each morning, the proprietor’s wife was to be found cleaning catfish. She stood in the shallow water, sleeves rolled up, hair pulled back, slashing and twisting and rending until the surface of the landing-stage was dark and slippery with blood and slime.

  We checked in then headed off, following a canal that cut away to the south-west from the main channel, until we came to a fork where we anchored. The water flowing down one arm was khaki, thick with suspended silt; down the other it was clear, looking black only because of the black mud beneath. We cast spinners into the mingling of the two streams. Toti’s rod was the first to bend. ‘Barsch,’ he grunted as the fish flashed in the water. I asked Grigore what barsch might be. ‘Barsch is …’ He hesitated. ‘Barsch is … barsch.’ It proved to be a perch of about half a pound. We caught some more, all about the same size. Then Toti got something a bit bigger, a long, slender silver fish with a lot of sharp little teeth which I didn’t recognise.

  Cleaning catfish for supper

  After a time the barsch stopped biting. We followed the dark, clear flow to a lake, but it was so clogged with weed as to be unfishable. We nosed past huge expanses of lilies, searching for ways into clear water, but they all had nets strung across them that sagged just below the surface between stakes driven into the mud. Grigore took the boat into a lagoon where he had had success before, but the weed was just as bad there. A single pelican was hunting along one bank, paddling slowly through the water, jabbing with its bill, occasionally tilting back its head to adjust the catch. Despite its outlandish appearance, the bird’s performance looked highly efficient, even menacing.

  Back at the pension I was introduced to a delta regular armed with a great array of rods, reels and boxes of tackle. He was a striking sight as he waddled about the place wearing a turquoise Adidas vest and a pair of outsize white shorts, both garments stretched to the limit and beyond by a vast barrel of a stomach rugged with hair. More hair curled up and over his mighty arms and shoulders to a neck like a section of a severed tree trunk. His head was completely smooth, like a dinosaur egg, his face nut-brown and creased with smiles, blue eyes bright with laughter as he peered over the top of gold-framed glasses.

  He was catching his share of catfish. But catching these requires the angler to spend many hours sitting motionless in a boat waiting for a bite, ideally at night, just when the mosquitoes are hunting. Grigore and Toti were not interested; nor – having once had a bellyful of it in Hungary – was I. We wanted pike. The great bald head shook slowly. No one was encountering pike, no one knew where they were.

  Next morning we roared upstream to a point where the Sulina channel intersected with the original course of the river. We diverted on to the Dunǎrea Veche, the Old Danube, then followed a cut north-east through marsh and waterlogged willow forest until we reached a big lake. This was Brogdaproste, the southernmost of a group of 20 or so lakes and lagoons contained in a great swathe of wetland between the Sulina and Chilia channels. Two years before, Grigore said, he and his friend the doctor had landed 90 pike between them here in one afternoon. But now the lake was thick with fibrous weed and there was not a pike to be seen.

  We went back to the Old Danube and along it to a village curiously named Mila 23, a well-known Lipovan settlement. I asked Grigore how the Lipovan fishermen were faring these days. Well, he said. They were all building themselves new houses, with electricity and running water. So the fishing is good? I asked naively. He laughed in the slightly dismissive way Romanians tended to adopt when questioned about the old days. He said they were all guiding tourists now. Why go fishing when there was easier money to be made? They’re not stupid, you know.

  A few miles due south of Crişan, about midway between the Sulina and Sfântu Gheorghe channels, was Caraorman, a Ukrainian village set among dunes of fine white sand. A little way from the village, on the edge of a basin excavated to one side of the canal, stood the gaunt shell of a factory with a block of apartments, half-finished and abandoned, next to it. Under one of the legion of Five Year Plans drawn up to realise the vision of Nicolae Ceauşescu, this was to have been the Caraorman Glassworks, another glorious milestone along the path mapped for Romania’s Industrial Revolution. Instead, its fate has been to provide haunts for bats and nesting sites for birds, and to commemorate the remarkable folly of the little man with the big ideas.

  Ceauşescu was challenged by the delta. Something must be done, he resolved, to drag this unproductive expanse of bog and water into the era of progressive socialism. What use to the Greater Romania were birds and fishermen with long beards who spoke Russian? Factories and blocks of apartments must rise. Conveyor belts and machines must be installed. Industrialisation must triumph.

  It was pointed out to the Leader that the peculiar geography of the place might make some aspects of his vision problematic. Very well, he reflected. Let factories and apartment blocks be built where possible. Elsewhere let the waters be constrained and engineered to enable crops to be grown and fish to be farmed.

  Over the 25 years of Ceauşescu’s rule, almost a quarter of the delta was drained and reclaimed for agriculture, aquaculture and forestry. Vast areas of wetland, with their breeding sites for resident and migrating birds, were lost. Spawning grounds for sturgeon and other fish were obstructed or destroyed. Pollution from ferti
lisers, herbicides, pesticides and farm wastes of every kind poisoned the waterways. Over the same period the whole Danube system was turned into a network of conduits to remove the filth of half the continent. The heavy industries of Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Hungary and Czechoslovakia poured their toxic waste into the Danube and its tributaries without restraint. By 1989 both river and delta were desperately – some thought terminally – sick.

  But rivers are difficult to kill. Their capacity for self-healing and regeneration is one of the wonders of the planet. All they need is some respite from attack, and in the case of the Danube that came with the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. In Romania, the glass factory at Caraorman and much else were overtaken by the whirlwind that spread from Timişoara in the winter of 1989 and sent Ceauşescu spinning on his way.

  Within a year the Danube Delta had been designated a UNESCO biosphere reserve. Work soon began on dismantling the most damaging of the dykes and dams so that the polders could revert to wetland. The aquatic food chain struggled back to life. The enormous discharge of nutrients, particularly phosphorus, which had caused the spectacular and disastrous eutrophication of the Black Sea, was sharply reduced thanks to improved waste-water treatment upstream and the enforced abandonment of much of the intensive agriculture. The closure of many factories and mines, combined with tighter pollution controls introduced under the aegis of the EU, sustained the recovery.