one in sight. After a brief wait in the cold of a March evening, I ring the doorbell at the Turkish–Romanian Friendship Association opposite, a low town house of just a single storey. The Turks governed Dobrogea for nearly five hundred years, and only lost their territories here in the 1870s. The remaining Turks have been transformed from rulers to an ethnographic oddity, but they have kept some of their treasures intact. A woman comes to the door and welcomes me inside like a prodigal son. A Turkish women's group has gathered for their weekly singing session: Vezza Sadula, Sabis Mahmet and Sabiha Ali lead the troupe. Some of the songs they have learnt on their annual trips to the Turkish heartlands, which they perform at folk festivals. But the best are old Turkish ballads from Dobrogea, about the Danube.
I saw a Romanian girl down by the Danube shore …
With no father or mother, her hands bound by strangers,
‘– Romanian girl, tell me the truth –
Where is your mother?’
‘I have neither mother nor father,
I'm alone in the world, orphaned and alone’
– ‘You an orphan, me a poor fellow
Let us be married!’
‘Marry you?’ she replied,
‘And wrap us both in this land of homesickness?’ 17
Why a Romanian lass would feel homesick beside the Danube, and where the Turkish lad arrived from, remain hidden in the mists of time. Tulcea was always a town for people in transit. It looks out towards the sea, and back up the Danube.
After four or five songs, the ladies are tiring, and one has lost her mobile phone. Soon the whole group is hunting high and low for it, and even the final chorus falls victim to the disappearance of new technology. Back in the small hotel in the harbour, I eat another perch then have an early night, lulled to sleep by the sound of waves lapping against the harbour and the cries of gulls.
CHAPTER 2
The Kneeling Oak
The crew our companions, were good lads
unchanging in the changing days
they did not grumble at the labour
the thirsts, the night frosts
like trees, like waves
they accepted the wind, the rain
the night cold, the heat of the sun …
G EORGE S EFERIS , ‘Argonauts’ 1
T HE B OAT from Tulcea down the Sulina arm of the Danube delta is packed with people and goods. Sacks of oats for the horses of Sulina, nappies for its babies, Greek oranges, Spanish tomatoes, Bolivian bananas, but above all people. Ladies with flowered headscarves, anchored to the deck with shopping bags, two narrow-hipped teenage girls on their way to visit their grandmother, middle-aged lovers making a new start, gazing into the wake of the boat, but most of all an army of chiselled-faced men, brooding over the stern in their Baltic-blue workers’ jackets, smoking in silent clusters on the deck.
Willows line the riverbanks, the old men of the river, their gnarled and twisted roots reaching down to the water for one last drink. Fast-growing Canadian poplars crowd behind them, like teenagers trying to get into a party. In one place a whole forest of them has been massacred, levelled to the ground. The Danube smells like the sea I grew up beside, in southern England, but greener, more pungent, unsalted. There are seagulls, though,and cormorants. Black, hook-necked, then straight-backed as soldiers with yellow noses, slow and dignified in their movements as surgeons, perched on driftwood on the banks of the river, diving gracefully as arrows into the water. Lone herons, cranes, storks and egrets. Only ducks and geese fly together in groups. All the others fish by themselves, with a wary eye on their fellow birds, or human interference with the life of the riverbank.
The ferry takes four and a half hours from Tulcea to Sulina, sixty kilo-metres east, on the Black Sea coast. There are no roads, just a labyrinth of creeks and marshes. The delta has the biggest concentration of reed banks on earth. The Black Sea into which the yellow-brown Danube pours is an inland lake, isolated from the
I saw a Romanian girl down by the Danube shore …
With no father or mother, her hands bound by strangers,
‘– Romanian girl, tell me the truth –
Where is your mother?’
‘I have neither mother nor father,
I'm alone in the world, orphaned and alone’
– ‘You an orphan, me a poor fellow
Let us be married!’
‘Marry you?’ she replied,
‘And wrap us both in this land of homesickness?’ 17
Why a Romanian lass would feel homesick beside the Danube, and where the Turkish lad arrived from, remain hidden in the mists of time. Tulcea was always a town for people in transit. It looks out towards the sea, and back up the Danube.
After four or five songs, the ladies are tiring, and one has lost her mobile phone. Soon the whole group is hunting high and low for it, and even the final chorus falls victim to the disappearance of new technology. Back in the small hotel in the harbour, I eat another perch then have an early night, lulled to sleep by the sound of waves lapping against the harbour and the cries of gulls.
CHAPTER 2
The Kneeling Oak
The crew our companions, were good lads
unchanging in the changing days
they did not grumble at the labour
the thirsts, the night frosts
like trees, like waves
they accepted the wind, the rain
the night cold, the heat of the sun …
G EORGE S EFERIS , ‘Argonauts’ 1
T HE B OAT from Tulcea down the Sulina arm of the Danube delta is packed with people and goods. Sacks of oats for the horses of Sulina, nappies for its babies, Greek oranges, Spanish tomatoes, Bolivian bananas, but above all people. Ladies with flowered headscarves, anchored to the deck with shopping bags, two narrow-hipped teenage girls on their way to visit their grandmother, middle-aged lovers making a new start, gazing into the wake of the boat, but most of all an army of chiselled-faced men, brooding over the stern in their Baltic-blue workers’ jackets, smoking in silent clusters on the deck.
Willows line the riverbanks, the old men of the river, their gnarled and twisted roots reaching down to the water for one last drink. Fast-growing Canadian poplars crowd behind them, like teenagers trying to get into a party. In one place a whole forest of them has been massacred, levelled to the ground. The Danube smells like the sea I grew up beside, in southern England, but greener, more pungent, unsalted. There are seagulls, though,and cormorants. Black, hook-necked, then straight-backed as soldiers with yellow noses, slow and dignified in their movements as surgeons, perched on driftwood on the banks of the river, diving gracefully as arrows into the water. Lone herons, cranes, storks and egrets. Only ducks and geese fly together in groups. All the others fish by themselves, with a wary eye on their fellow birds, or human interference with the life of the riverbank.
The ferry takes four and a half hours from Tulcea to Sulina, sixty kilo-metres east, on the Black Sea coast. There are no roads, just a labyrinth of creeks and marshes. The delta has the biggest concentration of reed banks on earth. The Black Sea into which the yellow-brown Danube pours is an inland lake, isolated from the
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