The long and winding story of the Danube

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.