The evanescent Pap Island of Szentendre

Szentendre is a small town, situated just north from Budapest, on the banks of the Danube. Whenever you have the chance to visit this small and beautiful baroque town take your time to visit also the town’s popular leisure center: the Pap Island. It has seen better times, concerning its existence as an island. Once the Danube had so wide and deep side-branch that man could pull vessels upstream on it. But nowadays, especially in autumn, when the river usually has very little water this side-branch is almost completely dried out (apart from some deep holes in the riverbed). My last trip on this island has made me think that the Pap Island is very much likely will disappear from the maps, unless there is an intervention. There is already a willow-forest connecting the trees of right bank with the riverine forests of the island, grown in the muddy river-bed. The silt bank is at least 3 feet high, which prevents the flow of fresh water into the dry side-branch.

Most beautiful bridge in the world

There are times, when words mean nothing. In this post, there will be no data, date, paragraphs of law, engineering plans and documents. Only plenty of old photographs selected from fortepan.hu of the Erzsébet bridge in Budapest, most beautiful bridge in the world. 

Count Marsigli and the Danube

Cover of the first edition, 1726

Count Luigi Fernando Marsigli embodies a long vanished kind of people, very dear to my heart, those we simply call a polymath. During his long life, he was a military engineer, military historian, general of the Habsburg army, diplomat, cartographer, meteorologist, ornithologist, mineralogist, anatomist, archaeologist, hydrologist, historian, marine scientist, ethnographer, art collector, geographer and botanist.

His major work is the reason why I devote an entry on him on the Donauinseln blog. The Danubius Pannonico - Myscius Observationibus geographicis, astronomicis, hydrographicis, historicis, physicis perlustratus was published in Amsterdam, 1726 in six volumes, more than twenty years after it was completed.

Marsigli first came to Hungary as a member of the dragoon regiment of Savoy in 1683, and fought throughout the war which lead to Hungary’s liberation from the Ottoman Empire. He fought at the liberation of Buda, and was a member of the Habsburg delegation at the Karlowitz peace treaty. In this context he worked as a cartographer drawing the new border between the two empires in southern Hungary. Together with Turkish cartographers they mapped the frontier within two hours walk on both sides of the border.

Erected for the rolling Danuvius...

...by Tiberius Haterius Callinicus. I read this weather-beaten inscription on a stone altar at the lapidary of the Aquincum Museum in Budapest (image on the left). People from the antiquity worshipped the Danube river as a God - I first read about this in a József Révay book (Walks in the roman Hungary, 1965) Besides carving altars for the river-god, they proudly named their children after it. Danuvius, son of Diassumarus is known from a stele, erected next to the Danube, and there was a Caius Retonius Danuvius, a pontifex of the emperors cult in Aquincum.

The Danube, as a deity existed earlier, in the Hellenic era too. Its name was Istros (Ιστριη), which meant strong and swift mediated from Thracian language. Istros was the river-god of the north and Scythia according to the Greek mithology. His parents were Oceanos and Tethys, his brothers were the Nile, Eridannus (Po) and Alpheus (Alfíos on the Peloponnesos)

Istros used to be the name of the lower section of the Danube, from the Iron Gates to the Delta. There was also a greek colony with the same name Istros south from the Delta, founded by Miletian merchants and settlers. Some say, thet Istros has a common root with Isar (German), Isére (French), Isarco (Italian) and the slav Bistrica. I’m not sure if it is true, but Greeks do not use this form for the Danube anymore.

Survivor of the 1838 flood - The horse-apple tree on the Margaret Island

Between March 6th and 18th, 1838, the Margaret island between Buda and Pest ceased to exist. For two weeks the whole island, a property of Archduke Joseph, the Palatine of Hungary was under water, while the moving ice-shield completely devastated it, on the 13th march. After the flood went down, replenishing works took place, clearing away almost all of the memories of the devastation. After the II. World War, the small, yellow palatine summer house was torn down, with the marble slab marking the high water mark of 1838. In the 1920s Gyula Krúdy, a known Hungarian writer described the “Seven chieftain sycamore tree”, which was broken in the icy flood, then grew 7 new branches. This tree has also disappeared since. Only one tree remained on the Margaret island, which still bear the marks of the flood, an old Horse-apple tree. 
 

City of three rivers - Dreiflüssestadt Passau

In hydrological point of view the German section of the Danube offers many interesting places. First of all: where does the Danube come from? There are two branches, the Breg and Brigach, and a wonderful well at Donaueschingen. Then there is the “Donauversickerung” phenomenon. This is the place where the Danube simply decides, that this time it flows right into the North Sea, rather than the Black Sea. And at Passau, the city of three rivers we find the estuary of the Inn river. You have to know, Inn has a discharge 7% more than the Danube. Moreover at first sight Inn is wider and somehow its color is different. Despite all, the Danube can keep its name and the Inn dissolves in the smaller river.

 

Fragmentum

 

It all started, when I found a piece of pottery on a Visegrád hillside with dense shrubs. At least it seemed like one. This piece of pottery is a meaningless garbage in ones hand, but it starts to talk in another persons hand. It tells a tale of the Danube, of wars, of mighty rulers, of huge forts and of the final collapse of an empire.

A Danubian saint - St. John of Nepomuk

Earlier I haven't noticed these statues. I walked them by as anybody else these days. Moreover I did not even read the inscription below them, of if I did I forgot soon this complicated name. Later on, as I walked more and more on the banks of the Danube, at the back of my mind there was a déja vu - Wow, I might have seen this statue before. Since then, any place I have been wandering near the Danube, orhave I been crossing ot on a ferry, I greeted St. John of Nepomuk as an old friend of mine.

Roaming the Croatian Danube-bend

The "Croatian Danube-bend expression in the title may not considered as an existing geographical name. I am not sure if anybody has used this expression before me. In this case it is not the scenery, or the rangy landscape that might resemble us the Hungarian Danube-bend, but it is because of the sudden change in the rivers direction. Let us look at this map, and explore this section of the river between Kopacki Rit and Vukovar (fig. 1.).

 

1. The Croatian Danube-bend and the mouth of Drava

Lighthouses of the Danube

 

Heartly I admit that until last week I had no knowledge of the Danubian lighthouses. At least I had a suspicion that maybe I have seen one in Vienna. I was quite sure that there must be some in the Danube-delta, one for every branch, but those are belonging to the Black Sea – I thought. Then I came upon Béla Vályi’s monumental map on the Danube valley in the known Hungarian geographer, Jenő Cholnoky’s heritage. As I was browsing these sections I saw something strange in the mouth of the Tisza river: a lighthouse! Wow, does it still exists?

 

Fallen star of the Danube - The ephemeral Tündér Island

In the Szentendre Danue, opposite the Luppa Island, there was a small island, which praises the work of Hungarian water construction and river regulation works. It praises it, because few similarly effective regulatory objects were built in the neighborhood. The Tündér (means Fairy in english) Island cross dam and some other works in less than 50 years made disappear a whole river branch together with its islands.
 

Do you see the 4 islands? In the middle, the entrance of the Fairy Island’s branch.

Summary of the year 2012

If I had to briefly summarize the year of 2012 from the point of view of the Danube Islands, I would only say: it was very good. However, as not even the most withdrawn school director would say a one-sentence speech at the year closing celebration, let us see more in detail what happened in this year on the hungarian version, the Dunai Szigetek.

 

We climbed up the Megyeri bridge, Budapest

Spiritual landscape of the Danube in 1941

In year 1941, Hungary regained most of its old parts, like southern Slovakia, Subcarpathia, northern Transylvania and Vojvodina. The Hungarian High Commands took efforts to revise the old maps of these territories. This country-wide mapping project started with aerial photography of Hungary. These images were assembled into orthophotos and also received labels and geographic coordinate system. You can see the result here, although many prints have been destroyed during the second world war. The surviving prints can be found at the Institute and Museum of Military History, Budapest. Recently these maps were digitised, as a member of this project I found many traces of long lost danubian branches in these black and white images.

section 4859_2 A new lake will be born.

 

Last spring on Ada Kaleh

It is very hard to say anything new of the sunken island of Ada Kaleh. Many memoirs, pictures, and literature can be found of this lost paradise, even on the internet, on many languages. In Hungarian, Romanian, German, English and Turkish as well. But very few films remained of it. This Romanian video shows the islands last spring, in two parts, before the complete island was flooded by the Iron Gate hydroelectric dam between Serbia (Yugoslavia and Romania)in 1968. It is not necessary to understand all that has been said by the narrator. The orchards of this lost world, the fort, the people, their houses, the peach trees, the unique rose-petal jam, the home-made cigars. The whole island, with its turkish inhabitants is gone. It is flooded by 30 meters (100 yards) of Danube water. The village and the fortress was torn town, taken on ships to rebuild almost everything on a somewhat downstream island, the Simian. This communist human experiment was unsuccessful, the turkish community dispersed as the petals of their peach orchard. Nothing remained.

 

Wildlife on holiday - Summer on the Rezéti-Danube

Gemenc is one of the largest floodplains along the Danube, that remained. The riverine forests and meadows have escaped the river regulations, thanks to the archbishop of Kalocsa. In the 19th century, the archbishop refused to join the regulation company which was founded to drain the floodpalins of Tolna county in Hungary. Thus the forests have survived and they soon became the most famous hunting places in Hungary, as a final refugee for game.

The gothic Zichy chapel of Lórév

Those who wander often on the danubian floodplains, will soon receive immunity against finding weird things in the riverine forests and meadows. I have seen many extraordinary things, such as mororcross tracks, alpine flowers, thujas escaped from gardens, trash thrown out of ships, slag from ancient steamboats, 30 million years old fossils, and even malls. Well, now I have seen one gothic chapel too.

This small chapel next to Lórév can be recognised from the opposite side of the Danube. It floats as an ethereal spectacle, and one can not understand how did this phenomenal catholic building got here, next to this small village, inhabited mostly by orthodox serbs. It is as weird, as if we find a thatched house in downtown Budapest.

November morningrise on the Danube

Autumn has arrived to the banks of the Danube. Dense fog hides in its side arms, between the trees. Rays of sunlight can only lift the vapor by noon. The unflinching river surface reflects river birds travelling southbound, like silver mirror. Dry leaves cover the parched river bed, which will be covered by ice and snow in weeks. Silence everywhere. Autumn has come to the Island of Göd too. For the photographers, and our utmost delight.

The swollen Margaret Island

  

If we go through the admirable photo collaction of Fortepan.hu with an eye got used to geomorphology, we can find a lot of interesting changes in the Hungarian landscape. So it is with Budapest's favourite island, the Margaret Island. Its name comes from Saint Margaret, daughter of the Hungarian King Béla IV. In the 30s, an unknown tourist captured this view from the Buda Castle. This photo has preserved the memory of the Víziváros, Margaret Island, further the Népsziget and the northernmost Palotai Island covered with dense forest.

But there is something strange with the Margaret Island. Its western side is quite barren, as if a real estate investor has just chopped the forest to build more hotels. But that is not the case. To understand, why the island looked like this, we have to go back in time.
 

Danubian archipelago on fire - archive pictures of the bombing of Hungary, 1944

Busy death is seeking this era... Fortepan.hu, a famous collection of old photographs has just published several pictures, taken from american bombers over Hungary, late summer and autumn in 1944. Dichotomy hides in these pictures. On one hand the Danube is rolling along in bright sunshine. We almost see the bathers on the sandy banks, as they cover their eyes from the sun, watching the approaching bombers in the sky. On the other hand, young american soldiers look down on the countryside, patterns of cities, roads, fields and meadows, like an outstreched map, on which red crosses are indicating the facilities, industries, bridges, railroad junctions to be destroyed. They let loose their deadly load as easy as pushing a button. And when completed their mission, they fly back to Italy, happy to survive the fires of the anti-aircraft batteries. And on one plane, a frightened photographer documents how much they managed to complete from the day's work.

I only selected these pictures, that have something to do with the Danube. Our trip begins in the Hungarian west, and we will go along the Danube, first eastbound, then we turn south in the Danube Bend. 

Geography of Saint Florian

Enns. A less than 254 km long tributary of the left side of the Danube. Starting from the Radstäter Tauern and initially heading to east, after a sharp break it turns north, cutting through the narrow alpine limestone ranges in the Gesäuse Gorge. Forming a boundary between Lower and Upper Austria, it flows into the Danube at the city of Enns, at the 2112 river kilometer. Its average water charge is 195 m3/s, but in time of flood they also measured 1020 at it. Its color is greenish blue, due to the sediments transported from the Alps. In 304 they drowned in this river Florian, the veteran Roman army officer, at the bridge of Lauriacum.

 

The bridges of Enns city over the Enns river