The third window on the left

MAGYARUL 

Patrick Leigh Fermor has arrived exactly 80 years ago, in late january, 1934 to the Austrian town Persenbeug. After having supper in the town inn and filling his journals for the day he made a sketch of the innkeeper's daughter. And he's been talking to an old polymath aristocrat till late night. About the Danube, its fish, especially the catfish, the kraken of the Danube, about hydroelectric dams, Romans, Markomanns, archaeology, flora and fauna, about Hans, ritter of Ybbs, the Tartars, Schubert, Wagner and about the Dodo bird of Mauritius. 

  

...The others had stolen away to bed hours before. The third bottle of Langenlois was empty and we stood up too. He paused in front of a glass case in which a bright-eyed and enermous stuffed trout was swimming urgently through a tangle of tin water-weed. It's a pity you didn't go on over the hills from St. Florian,' he said. 'You would have got to the little town of Steyr, and the Enns valley' - this was the green tributary I had watched curling out of the hills opposite Mauthausen - 'It's only half a dozen miles. Schubert wrote the Trout quintet there. He was on a walking tour, like you. 

 

He whistled the tune as we strolled along the snow-covered quay, with Dick bounding ahead and sliding comically out of control on the concealed ice. The steeple of Ybbs stood clear above the roofs and the tree-tops the other side. Above the roofs of our own shore, almost inevitably, a large baroque castle soared into the starlight. 'You see the third window on the left?' the polymath asked. 'It's the room where Karl, our last emperor was born.' After a pause, he went on whistling the tune of The Trout. 'I always think of streams running down to the Danube,' he said, 'whenever I hear it...

Patrick Leigh Feromor: A Time of Gifts. On foot to Constantinople: from the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube.

Between the woods and the water - From Orsova to the bridge of Traian

MAGYARUL

Patrick Leigh Fermor's entry on the Iron Gates gorge will guide us between Orsova and the bridge of emperor Traian in Turnu-Severin. This is the place where the Danube leaves the Carpathian Mountains, and flows on the Walachian Plains until reaching the Black Sea. You won't recognise anymore the landscape Fermor has seen. Since the Iron Gate dam was built in 1972 most of the landmarks mentioned in Fermor's journals are under water now.

Between the woods and the water - The cauldrons of Kazan

MAGYARUL

Patrick Leigh Fermor started his journey in december of 1933, from the Netherlands to Constantinople on foot. He was only 19 years old then. The young englishman arrived to Hungary at Easter, 1935 when crossing the bridge near Esztergom over the Danube. Thanks to the sympathy of the pro-British Hungarian aristocracy he had spent the time of his life. He was wandering through Hungary and Transylvania from castles to mansions. He was warmly welcomed everywhere, and he was really surprised that he could have spoken to everyone in his own mother tounge.  He wrote his journals during this trip in which he mentioned the life in the Buda castle as well as sleeping with nomad gypsies. He visited the cemetery of Segesvár (Sighișoara, Schäßburg) and watched the eagles soar above the Carpathian mountains. He did not know, but he described a condemned society which had less then ten more years before it completely disappeared. With all the rural beetle collecting aristocracy, just like in Agatha Christie's novels.  Mr. Fermor tells also a tale of a long lost view of the Lower-Danube, which we present you on the Donauinseln blog.

Between the woods and the water - Rose-petal jam of Ada Kaleh

MAGYARUL

One of the most important parts of the journals of Patrick Leigh Fermor is describing Ada Kaleh between the two world war. This little island, drowned in the name of 'progress' comes alive once more. Turkish language fills the summer air with smell of coffee, they linger together on the narrows streets, we can hear the hodja's voice from the minaret stuck in the ground like a sprear, while the old river - the Danube gently embraces the fortress island. This ethereal view can only be observed through Fermor's lines.

After the bridge at Turnu Severin, the doctor travelled on to Craiova and I caught a bus back to Orsova, picked up my stuff, bought a ticket for the next day's boat, then walked a couple of miles downstream again and found a fisherman to scull me out to the little wooded island I had my eye on ever since rejoining the Danube.

I had heard much talk of Ada Kaleh in recent weeks, and read all I could find. The name means 'island fortress' in Turkish. It was about a mile long, shaped like a shuttle, bending slightly with the curve of the current and lying a little closer to the Carpathian than the Balkan shore. It has been called Erythia, Rushafa and then Continusa, and, according to Apollonius Rhodius, the Argonauts dropped anchor here on their way back from Colchis. How did Jason steer the Argo through the Iron Gates? And the the Kazan? Medea probably lifted the vessel clear of the spikes of magic. Some say Argo reached the Adriatic by overland portage, others that she crossed it and continued up to the Po, mysteriously ending in North Africa. Writers have tentatively suggested that the first wild olive to be planted in Attica might have come from here. But it was later history that had invested the little island with fame.

Between the woods and the water - Ada Kaleh, the drowned island

 IN HUNGARIAN

It has been 40 years ago the Romanian authorities flooded dozen Danubian villages upstream the Iron Gate gorge in the name of „progress”. Patrick Leigh Fermor returned here once more, and devoted the epilogue of his book ’Between the woods and the water’ to this appalling devastation. Ada Kaleh, this little island with the Turkish inhabitants were forced to move to Simian Island downstream the hydroelectric station. Thier mosque has also been moved with the old fortress, but just like the old trees, their community did not survive. They disappeared in every corner of the world. Everything has fled.

Thoughts at a Café Table Between the Kazan and the Iron Gates

Progress has now placed the whole of this landscape underwater. A traveller sitting at my old table on the quay at Orsova would have to peer at the scenery through a thick brass-hinged disc of glass; this would frame a prospect of murk and slime, for he would be shod in lead and peering out of a diver’s helmet linked by a hundred feet of breathing-tube to a boat stationed eighteen fathoms above his head. Moving a couple of miles downstream, he would fumble his way on to the waterlogged island and among the drowned Turkish houses; or, upstream, flounder among the weeds and rubble choking Count Széchenyi’s road and peer across the dark gulf at the vestiges of Trajan on the other side; and all round him, above and below, th dark abyss would yawn and the narrows where currents once rushed and cataracts shuddered from bank to bank and echoes zigzagged along the vertiginous clefts would be sunk in diluvian silence. Then perhaps, a faltering sunbeam might show the foundered wreck of a village; then another, and yet another, all swallowed in mud.

He could toil many days up these cheerless soundings, for Rumania and Yugoslavia have built one of the world’s biggest ferro-concrete dams and hydro-electric power plants across the Iron Gates. This has turned a hundred and thirty miles of the Danube into a vast pond which has swollen and blurred the course of the river beyond recognition. It has abolished canyons, turned beetling crags into mild hills and ascended the beautiful Cerna valley almost to the Baths of Hercules. many thousands of the inhabitants of Orsova and the riparian hamlets had to be uprooted and transplanted elsewhere. The islanders of Ada Kaleh have been moved to another islet downstream and their old home has vanished under the still surface as though it had never been. let us hope that the power generated by the dam has spread well-being on either bank and lit up Rumanian and Yugoslav towns brighter than ever because, in everything but economics, the damage is irreparable. Perhaps, with time and fading memories, people will forget the extent of their loss.

Simian, the "new Ada Kaleh" island