Donauinseln: Definitive goodbye - Fifty pictures from the sunken Ada Kaleh island

11 October 2021

Definitive goodbye - Fifty pictures from the sunken Ada Kaleh island

IN HUNGARIAN

Waiting for the end. This could be the title of Ergün Koco's photo series on the island of Ada Kaleh, which was forced to submerge in relation to the construction of the Iron Gates I. dam. Ergün was a local Turk who used his camera to take one last photo of his homeland before the expulsion and perhaps collecting old family photos. Most of his pictures show a bygone idyll with storm clouds gathering behind. The island seems to be going about its daily routine, but on the other side of the Danube, infrastructure is being cut into the hillside to adapt to the new water level. Busy hands hammer away brick-by-brick the caissons of the island's eponymous fortress, while the wind chases the clouds across the sky. The waves of the Danube are still coming ashore, but the time is not far off when these waves will begin to lap higher and higher ground. They reach the coastal herbage, hug the stumps of felled trees, cautiously enter the thresholds of abandoned, demolished houses, and then take possession of the corridors of the fortress with ever-quickening steps, creeping up the walls like enemies. This process did not take place day by day; the vast reservoir was only gradually filled by the swollen river around 1969-1971. That is why it is impossible to give a precise date for the flooding of Ada Kaleh, since years may have passed between the last inhabitant taking to the water and the highest point of the island disappearing into the swollen river. Ergün Koco's pictures must therefore have been taken sometime in the late 1960s.

The author photographed all the buildings that were familiar and dear to him, even going up to the minaret and the neighboring hills, taking pictures of his family, relatives living and dead, the interior of their old house, familiar corners, and paths. He has nearly two hundred pictures, all of them imbued with a sense of definitive goodbye. By then, everyone knew that there was no longer any place for them on the island.

Finally, all was lost.