"Progress has now placed the whole of this landscape underwater", as Partick Leigh Fermor writes in his epilogue in his book "Between The Woodsa and the Waters, from the Iron Gate gorge, at a table in a submerged café in Orsova. The laconic realistic pessimism of the final sentence could not better express what has happened here: "and everything has fled". There are many ways of expressing the loss, but if only one image were needed to illustrate it all, one could look no further than Amand Helm's photograph from the same place from sometime in 1867.
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| Ada Kaleh and Fort Elisabeth before 1868. Source: Bibliothèque Nationale de France. |
On the Donauinslen blog, a single photo can sometimes get a special article if it is unique enough. By unique, we mean that the section of the Danube or the riverine landscape depicted has some additional meaning that not only details the landscape, but also has the chance to make the post a book-length long, with background information explained in diversified train of thoughts. The photograph of the fortress of Ada Kaleh (Fort Island in Turkish) by the Austrian photographer Amand Helm (1831-1893) shows the western tip of the island with the entrance to the Iron Gate gorge in the background, photographed from the Hungarian side, Orsova, and opposite the island a fortress on the Serbian coast, Fort Elisabeth, which, like the island, was most probably under Turkish rule at the time the photograph was taken.
Amand Helm's original collection of his Danubian photographs from 1868, called the "Donau Album" compilation, from which this photograph originally came, costs nowadays for around a million Hungarian forints (€2500). Moreover, the price is not for the whole album, from source to the delta, but for a single section of the series. Some of Helm's photographs are also available online, but this particular image is not among the Danube images in the Albertina collection in Vienna.
Born in Teplitz-Schönau (Teplice) in the Czech province of the Habsburg Empire, Amand Helm opened his first photographic studio in St. Wenceslas Square in Prague, but from the mid-1860s he worked in Vienna and Lower Austria, sometimes photographing railway construction projects such as the Crown Prince Rudolf railway. In 1868-69, he photographed the most notable sites along the Danube from source to the delta, from which he compiled the Donau-Album series mentioned above. In his photographs, the landscape appears like a painting, capturing almost the last natural, often ancient, moments before the effects of the Industrial Revolution, which arrived belatedly in Central Europe.
However, there is another twist to the story of the exceptional picture, which belonged to the French geographer Élisée Reclus (1830-1905), who donated it to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in 1886.
Forced into exile by his activism during the Paris Commune, he wrote his monumental 19-volume series 'La Nouvelle Géographie universelle, la terre et les hommes', published by Librairie Hachette, during his stay in Clarens, Switzerland, which consists the photo of Ada Kaleh in the third volume, called the "Central Europe, Austria-Hungary, Germany, 1878."
Fort Elisabeth was built in 1736 on the right bank of the Danube, not far from today's Tekija, when the Serbian side of the Danube was also under Habsburg rule after the Peace of Pozsarevac, according to Serbian historian Professor Miloš Petrović. The construction work was led by Johann Andreas von Hamilton, a Scottish-origin military officer, as commander and military governor of the Timis Banat, and the eponym was none other than the wife of King Charles III of Hungary, the most beautiful woman of her time, Queen Maria Theresa's mother, Princess Elisabeth Christine of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel.
Fort Elisabeth was probably part of a complex of forts built on the island of Ada Kaleh to control the Danube border and the shipping traffic through it. It had several levels, the central part of the fortress being at the level of the Danube, with a watchtower built on the steep hillside above it. According to the usual superstitious beliefs about the Danube, an underwater tunnel connected it to the island of Ada Kaleh, but if not a tunnel, a temporary bridge might have connected the two fortresses. Fort Elizabeth continued to exist and expand after its transfer from Austrian to Ottoman hands, and was regularly depicted on maps of the Lower Danube, most recently on the section of the Second Military Survey dated 1858. Although the area around the fortress became part of the Serbian Principality in 1833, it remained under the direct administration of the Ottoman Empire, with some 500 Turkish soldiers stationed there until the mid-19th century.
What man has created, man has also destroyed around here. Fortress Elizabeth was demolished by the newly independent Serbian state in 1868 at the Turkish request. The ruins were dismantled by the local population, then further destroyed by the construction of a road, and the ruins of the lower parts were submerged at the same time as the neighbouring Ada Kaleh Island, after the construction of the Iron Gate I hydroelectrical power plant.The water level of the Danube was raised by about 30 metres in this stretch, and the flooded coastal road was built that much higher, cutting irreparable wounds in the landscape on the sides of the mountains that tower in the background.
Finally, if the significance of Amand Helm's unique photograph were to be summed up in a single sentence, it is the very first photograph of Ada Kaleh Island that we know of, and the last and only known photograph of Fort Elizabeth.
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
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