The Danube Read Free Page A

fifteen years. Hybrid fish – a cross between different varieties of sturgeon – become more attached to the river than others, as though reluctant to return to the sea. The scientists noticed a remarkable fact: sturgeon were most plentiful in exactly those places where the Romans had built their forts. The commanders of Roman border garrisons, with units of a hundred soldiers or more to feed, were no fools. Sturgeon lived and bred in the Danube at that time in such numbers that their succulent pink flesh and black caviar became a staple food for soldiers garrisoned far from home. Civilisations rise and fall, but old sturgeon habits die hard.

    As I drive towards the delta from the West I see my first wind turbines, spaced out across the hills like dandelions, or the advance guard of a Roman army. The wind always blows in Dobrogea, keeping the hillsides bare and the grasses short and steppe-like. This is the southernmost, westernmost outcrop of the great grassland steppe regions of southern Russia, across which nomads in prehistory swept on horseback. They had the prevailing, northerly wind, known as crivăț in Romanian, at their backs. They must have felt quite at home on these low, worn granite hills. Their kurgans (burial mounds) still dot the landscape.
    Dobrogea, the land between the Danube and the Black Sea, is a wild, empty, moody landscape, little known even to most Romanians. The only book I can find on the region in the best bookshops of Bucharest is amassive tome of photographs by Razvan Voiculescu, a man on a motorbike that can take him to places best reached by sea, or on horseback. 7 There are granite cliffs like giant's teeth, with a single mulberry at the foot like the gift of a goddess. ‘In the depths of the night … I still hear the creaking of the boats moored at the foot of Citadel hill. There are roads there that lead nowhere, but which the locals stubbornly insist on roaming … The bridge with rusted rails between two dry hills, the infinity of sunflowers, the churches clumsily cast among fields of wild wormwood and rocks,’ Voiculescu writes in the preface. The beginning of the world, he emphasises, not the end of it. The place to begin my own journey, up the Danube.
    The villages I drive through have Turkish-sounding names like Saraiu and Topalu, small mosques, barely bigger than a prayer room, and thin, spiky minarets. Most of Romania's eighty thousand remaining Turks and Tatars live in Dobrogea. Like most invaders over the centuries, they fell in love with the place and stayed. Their great-granddaughters, shy girls with deep brown eyes and smiles to tame wild animals, sell little bunches of purple flowers, flashes of purple in brown hands as we pass.
    Sheep wander in flocks at the roadside, through a smudged cloud of smoke, downwind of a man bent over to burn off last year's grass. Threadbare carpets hang to dry on a line, hens peck in a yard beside a wooden shed packed high with corn cobs, and a policeman with a white-topped cap saunters wearily up the side of Razvan Voiculescu's road to nowhere.
    The image of dandelions for the wind turbines proves more appropriate than that of soldiers. Four hundred and fifty have sprung up in barely two years. Four thousand are planned for the whole of Dobrogea, many in the path of the millions of birds who migrate to and from the delta.
    On a blustery March morning, Daniel Petrescu drives me to Beştepe, which means ‘five hills’ in Turkish, overlooking Mahmoudia and the Sfântu Gheorghe arm of the river. Daniel is tall, with an easy grin and a massive pair of binoculars slung around his neck. Lake Razim, below Beştepe, is the largest in Romania, and stretches almost to the southern horizon. On the other side of the hills, the southernmost band of the Danube winds the last hundred kilometres to the sea. There's a strong breeze from the north and the skies are grey. A lone hooded crow swoops into the wind, then small clusters of chaffinches and