For much of its history the Danube has been a disappointment. It looks so tempting on the map but, far from being a natural motorway for trade and ideas, its sheer awkwardness has thwarted generations of visionaries, engineers, soldiers and dictators. Freezing up, expanding into baffling flood-plains, racing through narrow defiles and randomly scattered with dangerous islands and hidden rocks, it has at best tended to function only for fishermen and the most local trade.
Until the 19th century there was the additional problem, from a western point of view, of its lower reaches having Turkish owners who, as customers, had the disadvantage of wanting to kill or enslave everyone upriver. The 20th century saw the Danube blocked up in both world wars, broken in two by the Cold War, blocked up again in its Yugoslav stretches by devastated bridges in the 1999 Nato intervention and occasionally poisoned for hundreds of miles by chemical spills. As with the Rhine, we have today inherited a dammed, embanked, straightened, ecologically devastated version of something that once used — within the constraints of Europe’s climate and fauna — to be almost as wild and exotic as the Amazon.
Nick Thorpe’s wonderfully expert and thoughtful new book manages to deal with all these disasters while enjoying too the Danube’s surviving oddities and beauties. The book is a record of Thorpe’s journeys along the river from its Black Sea delta to its source, using various forms of transport and interrupted by a horrible bike accident in Budapest. Deciding to begin at the Danube’s mouth makes the whole book possible.
Hanging over the project is Claudio Magris’s overwhelming, omnivorous Danube (1986), which effectively owns the entire watershed when travelling from west to east, beginning at its origin in a ‘sodden meadow’ in Swabia.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in