The Danube (37 page)

Closer to Mészöly Street, I encounter the dog-walkers. Little clusters of smiley women with small, yapping dogs who walk over Gellért Hill at first light, and congregate on the street for a good chat while their dogs sniff each other. We greet one another warmly, with a nod or a grin, but never once stopping to go beyond appearances.

One morning in January, the children and I make a miniature snowman on top of the green litter bin at the tram stop from three small snowballs. The end result bears an uncanny resemblance to the Venus of Willendorf.
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The rim of his cap is a gleaming Hungarian five forint piece. When I come back, twenty minutes later, he has already gone – stolen for his cheap cap, knocked down by some fun-hating fellow perhaps, or taken carefully away and set up again on some glorious windowsill.

Twelve warm springs flow beneath Gellért Hill.
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In the Ottoman era this was known as Gerz Elias Hill, after a Bosnian hero, killed when he paused to pray in the midst of battle. The Turks called the springs the
atchik ilidja
– the ‘bath of the virgins’, and built a structure over it to keep the virgins suitably discreet and entertained during their ablutions.
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This was destroyed during the Austrian siege in 1686, and rebuilt piece by piece over the following centuries. When the dust had settled, the virgins returned, if we can believe the canvases of those fortunate nineteenth-century artists allowed in to paint them. The Hungarians more prosaically called it ‘the muddy baths’.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the hotel above grew ever more magnificent, with porcelain tiles from the Zsolnay workshop around the baths and scenes from János Arany's ‘Death of Prince Buda’ up the main stairs of the hotel.
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The sixth canto of the poem tells the story of a hunting expedition by Hunor and Magyar, which begins on the shore of the Caspian Sea in pursuit of a miraculous stag. It ends on the shore of the Sea of Azov, where the two heroes settle on an island and carry off two local maidens. Their offspring become the founders of the Huns and the Magyars. The closed area of the baths lies beneath the main road leading to Freedom Bridge. Stairs lead down off a long damp corridor to an octagonal pool where the
warm water disappears into the rocks. Invisible trams rumble overhead. The temperature is 30 degrees Celsius, but the humidity is close to 100 per cent. I climb a ladder into an overhanging cave to see the source of one of the springs, hewn deep in the reddish-grey rock.

Thermal waters are Hungary's hidden treasure. The earth's crust is thinner here, so the waters are closer to the surface than in most countries. The baths are famed for their healing powers, and for the sheer pleasure of immersing your body in them. They are situated in a gradual curve, starting at Gellért Hill, curling north-west from Buda through the Pilis Hills and finally to Hévíz – which means ‘warm water’ – 160 kilometres from Budapest. The warm waters must have been a decisive factor in encouraging first the Celts, then the Romans, then the Hungarian tribes to stay here, and no doubt made the Turks reluctant to go home as well.

In the early 1990s I began to research the fate of the springs of Budapest, alarmed by newspaper reports that suggested the water levels were falling dramatically. The opening of one new bath after another, especially on the Pest side of the river, the bottling of more and more spring water to be sold as mineral water, and the wastefulness of the bauxite and coal mines in Tatabánya, which poured first class water down the drain, day and night, all took their toll. If the thermal waters fall below a certain level in Budapest, the Danube will flow in and destroy them. From 1965 to 1975 alone, 292 thermal wells were drilled in Hungary. ‘We are on a knife-edge,’ István Sárvári of the Water Resources Research Centre told me, ‘and you cannot live on a knife-edge for long.’
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A team led by him drew up a plan to save the waters. The mines, thermal baths and mineral water bottlers were asked to limit their consumption. Swimming pools were told to clean and reuse their water, and leave the healing waters for the special establishments. The plan was largely followed. By 2012 there were two dozen bathing houses and thirty-six specialised baths in the Hungarian capital, tapping 118 thermal springs and consuming seventy million cubic metres of water a day. As far as I could find out, the danger has passed – for now. To put the numbers in perspective, the Danube flows through Budapest at an average rate of two thousand cubic metres a second. In the whole country there are close to 1,300 thermal baths.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Mihály Dresch and his Jazz Quartet played nearly every Friday in Kinizsi Street, on the far side of the
Danube from where I live. The venue was a spacious, rather dingy, students' bar, improved by the candles on each table, cheap beer, the haze of cigarette smoke, but above all by the music. Mihály Dresch himself, a tall willow of a saxophone player, silent as a bass player, could make a twig sound melodious.
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Over the years we move cautiously from a smile of recognition to brief exchanges of greetings. He rarely sings at his concerts, too busy with his flutes and clarinets and saxophones, but when he does his voice is haunting. My favourite is his rendition of a Transylvanian love song:

The Maros, or Mures river in Romanian, flows for 760 kilometres through Romania, to finally reach the Tisza in Hungary at Szeged, which in turn flows into the Danube near Slankomen. That's a lot of shoreline, to walk with one's sweetheart, and fall asleep and dream the sweetest as well as the most bitter dreams.

Another version of the same song has a man fall asleep beside the Tisza, not the Maros. He dreams the saddest dream, that ‘I will never be yours, my darling’. He wakes to see nine gendarmes standing over him. ‘Where are your papers?’ they ask. ‘I'll show you my papers,’ he says, and pulls out a pistol from the inner pocket of his jacket, and shoots down two or three of them. ‘Oh God, what shall I do now? Should I flee or should I stay?’

In my wardrobe at home I have a bright blue T-shirt, embroidered with both the Turkish crescent and Hungarian tricolour, a gift from the President of Turkey Sultan Demirel when he visited Budapest in 1997. The year is
embossed on the shirt, just beneath the flags, with the name Gül Baba. The shirt is so well made, it looks as good as new sixteen years later. Gül means rose in Turkish, and Gül Baba is the father of the roses, just as Babadag in Romania near the start of my journey was the mountain of the father. Gül Baba was a Bektashi monk who arrived in Buda after the battle of Mohács in 1526, already advanced in years.
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He died in 1541 during the first Friday prayers to celebrate the Ottoman occupation of the city by Suleiman the Magnificent, in what is now Saint Mátyás church. Janissaries were soldiers of the Ottoman armies, abducted by Turkish press-gangs from Christian families in their youth, then trained as soldiers or administrators of the Ottoman empire. Many were Bektashis.
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It is the only one of the mystic Sufi orders that permits the consumption of wine – for religious purposes. This clearly endeared them to the wine-loving Hungarians, as did Gül Baba's work on the ground. He established a soup kitchen for the poor on what has been named Rose Hill ever since, in his honour.

An octagonal tomb or
türbe
was erected over his grave by the Turks. This was one of the few Ottoman buildings which the Hungarians and Austrians did not demolish after the Turks were expelled in 1686. For a brief period in the eighteenth century it was converted into a Christian chapel dedicated to Saint Joseph, but since then the tomb's Muslim character has been respected by the Hungarians. In the mid-1990s it was carefully restored with Turkish state funds. A rather fanciful bronze statue of Gül Baba now stands at the start of a little promontory, with an excellent view along the Danube. There is a rose garden, with roses brought from Turkey as well as local, Hungarian varieties, a fountain and an art gallery. Outside the site, old horse chestnut trees bow their heads over the tomb. Inside, the coffin is draped in emerald green embossed with gold, and the Bektashi mitre, the symbolic turban of the sheikh, stands at the raised end. It is the quietest and one of the most beautiful places in the whole city. It is also the northernmost place of Islamic pilgrimage in the world. On the eve of the First World War, in an early flurry of Hungarian–Turkish friendship, a joint commission of archaeologists excavated the tomb.
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Beneath the floor they found the skeleton of an elderly man, corresponding in stature and date to the sparse descriptions of Gül Baba, as well as the remains of two other men, one a soldier, killed in battle, probably during
the siege in 1686. My 1907 edition of Béla Tóth's
Gül Baba
portrays a white-turbaned, white-bearded fellow on the cover, leaning on a walking stick, surrounded by pink roses. ‘The scent has long gone …’ the tale concludes, ‘the grandchildren have died, but the memory of the good Gül Baba lives on, a saint even if he performed no miracles, a poet even if he wrote no verses, and a man who loved roses, even if he sometimes wasted a few.’
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In March 2010 I took an underground train to the docks at Újpest to board the
Tatabánya
, a handsome riverboat, built at Balatonfüred on the shore of Lake Balaton fifty years earlier. Forty-nine metres long and seven metres wide at her broadest point, she had a 1,200 horsepower diesel engine, and could reach twenty kilometres per hour in quiet waters. Boat enthusiasts devoted their free time for several years to lovingly restoring her. The month before my journey, she was involved in the rescue of two German registered barges, the
Würzburg
and the
Bavaria 53
, which struck an infamous ledge of rocks on the riverbed near Dömös, in unseasonably low water on the Danube. On that March day her crew were commissioned to deliver the shell of a floating restaurant to a customer beyond Esztergom, about six hours steady haul upstream from Budapest. There's a crew of five, including Gábor Jáki, president of the Hungarian Shipping Association, and László Vasanics, the captain. The cold of the March morning soon evaporates on the bridge, as we head out under the railway bridge and leave the noise of the city far behind. The sun comes out and the water is as clear as a mirror, reflecting perfect cumulus clouds. The wheel of the
Tatabánya
is enormous, and the ship only responds to a strong spin in one direction or the other. All the crew sail for the pleasure of it now – most are ex-employees of the state shipping company Mahart.

‘In communist times,’ one of the older crew tells me, ‘the best thing about working for Mahart was the smuggling.’ Travelling once a month up the Danube to Regensburg in Germany, the crew would hide caviar and champagne behind the panels on the journey upriver, and fill the same cavities with French perfumes and jeans – unavailable in the eastern bloc – on the way back. In 2004 Mahart was privatised and lost all its river-going goods ships, though it continues as Mahart Passnave with some passenger traffic. The privatisation was the final blow in a long decline in
the fortunes of Hungarian river transport since the glory days of the late nineteenth century when Orşova was still a Hungarian port, and when Hungarian ships dominated the middle and lower sections of the river. The rot began when Hungary lost the First World War on the German side, and lost not only two thirds of its territory but had to pay reparations. These included the pride of the Hungarian river fleet. This was painstakingly rebuilt in the 1920s and 1930s, only to be decimated again in the last years of the Second World War, sunk by Russian air raids and mines laid in the river, during the terrible four-month siege of Budapest in the winter of 1944. The fleet was restored under the communists, and between 1945 and 1995, ‘three million passengers and two million tonnes of cargo a year were transported on the Danube,’ the Mahart website proclaims proudly.
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In 2004 the Hungarian cargo fleet was bought by the Austrian Danube Steamship Company DDSG. Then it was sold to the Swiss firm Ferrexpo in 2010, which ships iron ore pellets on the Danube. The pellets are produced at the company's vast open-cast mines in central Ukraine, on the left bank of the Dnieper river. The iron, which feeds the steel plants of Europe, is quarried from beneath lands which once fed one of Europe's first civilisations: the Tripol'ye-Cucuteni.
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The engine room of the
Tatabánya
is an orchestra of grey-, green- and red-painted pumps and pistons. It is also the warmest place on the boat. The paint is peeling, however, and the ship is losing money, and may have to be sold. The sun disappears behind the clouds. We pass Vác, with its famous prison right on the shore of the river. This was once home to the Hungarian train bomber Szilveszter Matuska, who escaped in the chaos after the Second World War and was never seen again.
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The Danube is silver now, painted with black and white clouds. We pass Szentendre, a pretty town of yellow churches, where Serbs fleeing the Turks took refuge. In 1720 nearly 90 per cent of the population were south Slavs. We take advantage of the high Danube, leave Szentendre Island to starboard, and come out on to the wide Danube bend at Visegrád. The sandbanks on the northern tip of the island are invisible beneath the swirling waters. When the river is low, this has always been a favourite place to bring my children, to build fires from driftwood, caught high and dry in the tall willows on the shore.

Opposite Visegrád, on the left bank of the Danube, is Nagymaros, where the final section of the Gabčikovo-Nagymaros hydroelectric project
was nearly constructed.
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The avant-garde jazz pianist György Szabados brought his grand piano down on to the shore of the river, to play against the dam. The Danube Circle, led by the biologist János Vargha, was formed to oppose it. When I came to Hungary in the mid 1980s, my first reports were about the Danube Circle. At that time you could be arrested or beaten up by police for even wearing their badge – a winding blue line, split by white. Austrian Parliamentary deputies came to Budapest in 1986 to help the campaign, and were detained in Batthyány Square at the entrance to the metro. When I tried to take photographs of the arrest, I was detained with them. We spent three hours locked in a classroom as embarrassed policemen and their political masters tried to decide what to do with us. Eventually we were released with a warning. Illegal demonstrations up to twenty thousand strong marched on parliament to demand that the project be scrapped. The first democratically elected government, under József Antall, unilaterally cancelled construction. The Slovaks pushed on regardless, and twenty years later, the two countries are still arguing over the division of the waters. László Vasanics explains why the question of the Nagymaros dam is still a painful one for Hungary. The site at Nagymaros is the only place it could have been built, he explains, because of a cliff beneath the waters close to the village of Dömös, a few kilometres upstream from Visegrád, and because of the Szentendre Island which we have just passed. Also, it happens to be one of the most beautiful places in the whole country, since the loss of the mountains of Upper Hungary (Slovakia) and of Transylvania, to Romania, after the First World War. The Pilis mountains on our left, and the Börzsöny mountains on the right, hide their heads behind hands of low cloud.