Danube Portfolio, Part One: On Troubled Waters
A cruise back in time, and not in a comfortable way. WRITTEN & ILLUSTRATED by PETER MOORE
IN EASTERN EUROPE, MEMORY LANE IS POCKMARKED WITH LAND MINES. When I booked our Danube cruise I was fixated on the glittering bookends—Vienna, Istanbul—and unprepared for all the difficult histories in between.
Patrick Leigh Fermor tried to warn me.
I discovered his classic travel journal Between the Woods and The Water while working on “The Fifty Best Hiking, Trekking, and Walking Books of all Time” for Backpacker. The book chronicled Fermor’s walk, at age eighteen, from Hook, Holland, to what was then called Constantinople. He began his walk in 1933, the same year Adolph Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany. (Which reminds me: Americans: have you registered to vote, yet?) Fermor followed the Danube, just like I would! Wheee!
Fermor’s book is so studded with gems that King Charles could wear it to Westminster Abbey. “Dropping toward the watershed,” Fermor wrote, “the sun filled the place with evening light and kindled the windows and the western flanks of cupolas and steeples and many belfries, darkening the eastern walls with shadow; and as we gazed, one of them began to strike the hour and another took up the challenge, followed by a third and soon enormous tonnages of sectarian bronze were tolling their ancient rivalries into the dusk.”
Now, I’m haunted by those enormous tonnages and sectarian bronzes and ancient rivalries, and how they carry over into the present. But at the time I booked the cruise I thought:
Danube! ✔
Luxury ship! ✔
Gems of Eastern Europe (the name of our cruise)! ✔
Then we landed in Vienna, and I finally looked at a map: Austria is just a mere Slovakia away from Ukraine. To the south are countries—Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia— where the paint is still wet on their border signs, which were bloodily rewritten in the 1990s.
This wouldn’t be an ordinary vacation. More like: Privilege floats on troubled waters. What follows are excerpts from my daily journal, with drawings I completed along the way. If they seem calm and reasoned, it’s because I sought peace in the face of relentless history.
Saturday, 28 September 2024. Somewhere over the Arctic Circle
What fitful night on the plane! I was the fidgetiest flier ever! And yet I tried to remind myself that I was doing a very privileged sort of suffering. The weird part came when I “awoke” to see a red rim on the horizon, and then a glowing blob formed above it. As it grew into a full disc, it hovered in the night sky, but darkness prevailed. In my night stupor I suspected that the world was ending, but the captain hadn’t yet informed us.
It turned out it was just the sun, rising as usual. Whew!
Sunday, 29 September 2024. Vienna, Austria
I’m seated in the lobby of the Grand Hotel Wien, looking out over the autumnal city scene in Vienna. In the Germanic part of the Continent, I can still hear a faint echo of the roar that issued from this part of the world during the first half of the last century. Still, it has an august feel to it—a beauty and efficiency that I don’t expect or experience back home. In the U.S. we don’t invest in institutions and public life the way they do here. We’re so poisoned against government activism and expense that we just let it all go to hell. Here, they make the investment in infrastructure and orchestras and public art to ensure that everyone will enjoy them. It’s ennobling, in fact. For dinner, we were directed a few doors down to the Cafe Schwarzenberg, redolent of the Old World. An aproned, dignified waiter set heavy utensils in front of us, then paused to take our order. Hungarian goulash, if you please. It set me up for the stew of heady experiences that was coming my way.
After our food arrived, a pianist and violinist took their places at the end of the dining room. I expected “Eine Kleine Natchmusik,” which Mozart wrote when he was living in Vienna. But no, they launched into highlights from My Fair Lady. Probably to make the Americans and Brits in the room happy. And we were.
Tuesday, 1 October 2024. On the Danube.
Having a quiet moment here on the good ship Amabella, our home on the Danube. We’re fortunate to have a berth on the port side, with a view of beautiful downtown Mohács, Hungary. Just now two of the local kids are climbing a tree onshore, and taunting each other in Hungarian. Which is nuts. They live here, 500 miles from the war in Ukraine.
And, um, we’re on “vacation.”
The Danube is dotted with flotsam from recent, apocalyptic storms—tree branches, inverted soda bottles, and wooden frames torn from riverside structures.
The cruise before ours was cancelled because most of the docks were under water. That goat thinks that was a good decision.
2 October 2024. Vukovar, Hungary.
When I peeked out the curtains in Vukovar, I thought: Well, this isn’t a very special place. It was better than that: It was complicated. As we would learn on our tour, Vukovar was the epicenter of the Yugoslav Wars that raged here during the 1990s. Where we sip cocktails and enjoy fine cuisine, the citizenry suffered a military siege that killed 140,000 people. In the history museum in town, I watched news footage from those times, including a temporary morgue lined with body bags, and a boy with a perfectly round puncture wound to his skull. Several buildings in town were left with their bomb scars, to remind us what war does.
A faction of these people chose to fight, but everyone suffered. They still are suffering. On our walk through town, I saw men and women of a certain age—my age, in fact—and wondered: What atrocities did they witness? Or perpetrate? Who did they lose? Have they recovered? Will they?
2 October 2024. Novi Sad, Serbia
We had an engaging and sobering dinner with two of our new friends on the ship, discussing their end-of-life worries and plans. Then we gulped our wine and rushed off for the last tour of the Day: the Petrovaradin Fortress. The buses rolled out at around 9pm, so it was good and gloomy when we reached the dungeon doors that granted access. The tunnels under the castle had a strong “catacombs of Paris” feel to them, without the bones. There we no particular battle details either; the defenses were so impenetrable that not even the Ottomans dared to storm these ramparts. It was creepy to stumble around in the dark stone hallways and hear about their battle plans—this after seeing what war had done to the people of Vukovar. One man’s castle tour is another’s atrocity. On the way back to our ship, our tour guide told us the story of how, when the Nazis were deserting Novi Sad, they laced the fortress with enough explosives to reduce it to a giant pile of rock, to keep it out of Allied hands. The Nazis entrusted the detonators to an Italian soldier who had served with them at the fortress. Only, he was in love with a young woman who lived in the village outside Petrovardin’s walls. If the fortress went, so would she. So he waved buh-bye to the Nazis, dismantled the detonators, married the girl, and Petrovardin stands.
How do they know this? A few years ago, the couple’s daughter visited Novi Sad, and told the tale. Amor vincit omnia. Even over Nazis, evidently.
By the way, the central tower of Petrovaradin holds what is known as the “drunken clock,” which is unusual in a couple of ways. When the clock was installed in 1750, the makers reversed the hands—the short one tells the minutes, the long one the hours—so that sailors could tell the hour from the Danube. The “drunken” part refers to the clock mechanism, which speeds up when the weather is hot, and slows down in the winter chill. It’s still wound by hand, digital accuracy be damned. The spike above the clock thrusts a golden heart toward the heavens.
If there’s a God, I hope s/he takes notice. This region could use it.
END OF PART ONE. PART TWO: THE FLOAT CONTINUES, FROM BELGRADE TO CONSTANTINOPLE ISTANBUL, THROUGH THE IRON GATES. SOUNDS DANGEROUS, RIGHT?
“Unfortunately, for a variety of specific reasons—in Romania, in Bulgaria, in Albania, and in a very different sense, in Yugoslavia—the struggle with the past and the political front is still the dominant reality. It is not the shaping of the future that now determines what is going on. It is the struggle with the past.” —Zbigniew Brzezinski
Or, exercise your precious right to free speach, and…
Or buy me a Jelen, Serbia’s most popular beer.
If this is all too depressing, you can get a pick-me-up from my latest contribution to The Oldster Magazine, answering more questions about what it means to be 67.
Thanks for being here.
Hmmmm. 🧐 The food on Amawaterways, our tour operator, was excellent, as was the “chef’s table” seven-course tasting menu on the ship. A special event! But our best meal, which you’ll read about in the next post, was at a rooftop restaurant hard by the Blue Mosque, in Istanbul. The food was as special as the view.
Gosh, I learned so much, Peter. A great post; its dark grit tempered with Moorean insights. 'The grey Danube', gosh, those three words carry such weight in this piece.