Sometimes it's hard to tell where a river begins. It's doubly difficult with the Danube, born of two rival sources, both trickling down the slopes of Germany's Black Forest. But such ambiguity seems fitting, for the Danube is hard to pin down. Its name conjures graceful couples waltzing the night away in 19th-century Vienna, and for the first third of its nearly 1,800-mile (2,900-kilometer) journey to the Black Sea it plies an idyllic course beside tidy villages and storybook castles. But there is another Danube River, mainly in eastern Europe, one damaged by pollution and war. A NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999 destroyed industrial facilities, releasing contaminants into the water, and blew up three main bridges, which halted or diverted as much as a billion dollars in business.
But the Danube had a dual personality even before the bombing. The river is a playground for swimming and boating; it's also very much a working river of fishermen, barges, power plants, and shipyards. The working river is part of a busy transportation corridor connecting the North Sea with the Black Sea through the Main-Danube Canal, but it also feeds wetlands and valuable wildlife habitat. Today people along the river are striving to reconcile these competing demands and are beginning to undo years of environmental and war damage.
When I sought the river's source, an April snow shower greeted me on the farm of Hansjörg and Beate Heinzmann in the mountains of the Black Forest. Tapping the headwaters of the Brigach River, Frau Heinzmann held a blue-flowered pitcher below an opening in a stone slab near the farmhouse and then filled my glass. Downriver I would taste the wines of Austria. Here I swirled this cold, fresh vintage in my mouth. With just a hint of mineral tang, it was absolutely refreshing.
The Brigach has become a shrine for people from the ten countries through which the Danube flows. "We get a lot of visitors, mostly drop-ins," said Frau Heinzmann. When I stopped by at 11 a.m., 65 people had already visited that day. Drawing on the flow of travelers, the Heinzmanns have built a bed-and-breakfast on their farm.
A rival source lies near the city of Furtwangen, where waters of the Breg River flow through another stone marker next to a resort hotel. That stream has a stronger claim since it begins farther from the Danube's mouth. Underground streams from the Breg and Brigach meet in an ornate stone and concrete pool next to Fürstenberg Palace in the city of Donaueschingen. Only there does the river—Europe's second longest, after the Volga—take the name Danube.
I began following its course at Ulm, the first navigable point on the river, here patrolled by graceful swans. The world's tallest cathedral spire crowns Ulm's Gothic structure. From the top you can survey what was the medieval duchy of Swabia, one of a procession of powers—Celts, Romans, the Holy Roman Empire, Ottoman Turks, the Habsburgs, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Nazi Germany—that has held sway within the long Danube Basin. An outpost of the Roman Empire remains about 110 miles (177 kilometers) downriver at Regensburg, where walls of a fortress built in a.d. 179 still stand.
Leaving Germany, the Danube flows eastward into Austria, whose Wachau Valley is fertile ground for both piety and wine. Terraces of vineyards climb slopes as if to seek benediction from the great medieval monasteries that command the hilltops at Melk and Krems. The river passes castle ruins and apricot orchards that spangle the banks with snowy blossoms.
Wachau's scenery is captivating, but no place is as identified with the Danube's charm as nearby Vienna. At the Café Landtmann, where Sigmund Freud took his morning coffee, I savored a strong brew while sifting through racks of out-of-town newspapers. And in the shabbily genteel Liechtenstein Palace I took in a performance of the "Blue Danube" waltz, the melody that evokes Vienna the world over.
Vienna was a hub of the Habsburg empire, and in the 1860s, after Austria's defeat by the Prussians, Johann Strauss wrote the "Blue Danube" to cheer up his fellow Austrians. His music was "an evocative bow," wrote modern critic Harold C. Schonberg, to "a Vienna of young hussars and beautiful ladies, a Vienna of sentimentality and charm, a pretty-pretty and never-never Vienna of dance and romance."
Downriver from Vienna the Danube cleaves Hungary's capital of Budapest, with Pest on the left bank, commanded by the stately parliament building, and Buda on the right, crowned by Castle Hill, where King Béla IV built his stronghold against Mongol invaders in 1255. Between the banks sits Margaret Island, named for Béla's daughter, where I strolled paths flanked by gazebos, playgrounds, band shells, and young couples entwined on shaded benches like living statues.
Like other central and east European countries, Hungary shed its Soviet-dominated government more than a decade ago. But it's still plagued by an international dispute rooted in the communist era. In 1977 Hungary and Czechoslovakia agreed to build dams—one by each country—on the Danube where it winds along their border. Czechoslovakia (which split into Slovakia and the Czech Republic in 1993) built a dam and a shipping canal that diverted water from the river, adversely affecting wetlands and water quality. But after Hungary rejected communism, concern about costs, water supplies, and environmental damage led it to halt plans for its dam. The result was a massive joint public works project only partly finished—symbolic of the conflicts that arise as a new post-communist sensibility struggles to be born.
South of Budapest I found the river in a happier state. At Duna-Dráva National Park I rode with park ranger Barnabás Felső in a small boat to one of the many islands in the park's flooded landscape. He pulled up to a fenced plot that he's turned into a kind of open-air retreat and toolshed. From the river he hauled a net that yielded four vigorously flopping fish he called golden ide, which were soon sizzling in a cauldron over a smoky fire.
Inside the enclosure Felső had erected reed platforms and shelves raised well above ground. "Those are to protect articles during floods," Felső said. "The water often gets this high," he added, holding his hand just below his heart. He already stood about eight feet (2.4 meters) above the river's surface.
As I ate crispy chunks of fish, Felső produced an aerial photo of his park showing irregularly shaped ponds connected by winding man-made channels. Centuries ago this system irrigated pastures and orchards growing dozens of varieties of apples, pears, plums, and cherries. Fish were raised in the ponds and trapped by wicker fencing when floodwaters receded.
The system declined in the 16th century, disrupted when a huge Turkish army crossed central Europe to secure the western reaches of their empire. By the end of the 19th century the serpentine Danube had been forced between dikes put up to create land for growing grains.
Back in the boat after lunch, Felső pointed out rock piles that the park is spacing out on either side of the river in a staggered pattern designed to force the water to assume a more natural winding course, a result that will take up to two decades to achieve.
The river that day was broad and serene, colored dark green in the shade of half-drowned trees. "This environment is good for birds that need lots of water," Felső said. Indeed, the 122,000-acre (49,400-hectare) park harbors an abundance of bird species. "We''ve got eagles, falcons, herons, and 40 pairs of black storks. This park may be their last chance."
South of Duna-Dráva scars of war began to appear, reminders of the conflict ten years earlier between Croatia and Serb-dominated Yugoslavia, which here face one another across the Danube. In Bilje bullet holes pockmark the headquarters of Kopački Rit Nature Park. From there biologist Tibor Mikuska drove me to a levee whose thick grass conceals countless mines left from the war.
Mikuska pointed to a path worn through the grass that led down along a safe section of levee to a concrete bulkhead. Such trails are left by anglers, and many of them were out that fine day, casting lines into waters teeming with fry. Commercial fishing was outlawed here in the 1970s, and Mikuska wants to restrict sport fishing to the park''s least environmentally sensitive areas.
"The park should be open to the public, but people can no longer just go in and do what they want," Mikuska said. Shooting waterfowl is now outlawed, and park staff hope to limit big-game hunting. They are also training locals as nature-tour guides and encouraging them to open their homes as bed-and-breakfasts. "We want to make people proud of this area."
Kopački Rit and other Danube preserves work under the rubric "sustainable": Steer locals away from practices that harm the ecosystem and encourage approaches that are less injurious but that still provide a decent living.
The contrast between Blue Danube nostalgia and reality couldn't be sharper than in Yugoslavia, which was bombed by NATO to halt President Slobodan Milosevic's attacks on ethnic Albanians in the southern province of Kosovo.
Sitting on the Danube 47 miles (76 kilometers) upstream from Belgrade, Novi Sad suffered mightily, with an oil refinery and three bridges destroyed. There, in a neighborhood of modest houses, a tearful woman named Jasminka Bajic smoked and drank tiny cups of strong Turkish coffee, recounting how she lost her husband, Milan.
"It was 12:20 a.m. on June 8, 1999," she recalled. "No one expected the bombs to hit that close to the houses." Milan was in the doorway of their home when a bomb landed across the road. "I had to sell all my cattle to buy the gravestone," she said. Jasminka now works as a janitor for a local labor union. As compensation for her husband''s death, his employer built a new house for her and her two daughters.
Later that day at a small marina I met a fisherman named Velimir Teodorovic, who also has vivid memories of the NATO bombing. In his boat we sped toward two enormous concrete slabs sticking out of the water.
The slabs, remnants of the Freedom Bridge, formed a V with its point below the surface. Teodorovic nosed the boat onto one of the slabs, walked up its surface, and pointed downriver.
"I was right there, fishing for sturgeon and catfish, when the first rocket hit," he said. "People got out of their cars and started running back up the bridge, but I yelled at them to get into my boat because more rockets might hit." Sure enough, two more struck just after seven people scrambled aboard.
When we returned to the marina, I was struck by another Danube contrast: people in white lawn chairs under shade trees, drinking and laughing within the sobering sight of the bombed bridge.
The NATO attacks caused billions of dollars of damage and took a reported 500 lives. At risk were hordes of Serbian refugees who had fled from Kosovo to northern Serbia, where thousands remain. In Belgrade I went to a recreation center crammed with 33 refugee families. Small patches of territory, most of them no more than ten feet square (one meter square), were partitioned with blankets and plastic sheets.
"I was the richest man in ten villages," Dobrivoje Mojsic, an elderly farmer, told me. "My family used to get along with the Albanians. One evening we were drinking coffee with them. The next evening they came to kill us." He said his life was spared only because a neighbor who owed him money paid it instead to Mojsic's captors for his freedom.
The 78 days of bombing left a mammoth job of cleaning up the river. Much of it has been undertaken by the Budapest-based Danube Commission, funded largely by the European Union and nations in the Danube watershed.
"About a thousand ships were trapped, upriver and downriver from Novi Sad, in the ports of all the Danubian countries because of the bombed bridges," said Danail Nedialkov, the commission's top administrator. Besides the Freedom Bridge, two other nearby bridges were destroyed, then hastily replaced. A temporary pontoon bridge made of barges takes up some of the slack. It is opened to let ships pass, but navigation is still hindered because that is done only briefly a few days a week.
The commission has prepared an environmental impact statement for the river clearance, addressing such issues as neutralizing undetonated bombs and removing collapsed bridge sections—perhaps using explosives—without damaging historic sites or parklands.
Farther downriver, near Belgrade, the attacks crippled the city of Pancevo, destroying fertilizer and petrochemical plants and an oil refinery. The fallout: noxious gasses in the air and ammonia, mercury, crude oil, and petroleum derivatives in the river and groundwater.
"An environmental catastrophe," declared Borislava Kruska, Pancevo's mayor, who branded the bombings "a crime against humanity. The international community is primarily concerned about Novi Sad bridges not because of our suffering but because they want their navigational route opened."
There's no doubt that clearing the river has high priority for the Danube nations. Ocean-going ships off-load onto river vessels at Galaţi, Romania, and the bridge downings far upstream are costing Romanian shippers ten million dollars a month in lost business.
The bridge disaster affected people of all incomes. In the town of Tutrakan, Bulgaria, on a hill overlooking the Danube and Romania across it to the north, 65-year-old Dimo Kovachev sat idle on a tree stump. Below, on the waterfront, sat the town''s crane, which he operated before retirement five years ago. It was also idle. "There's just no work here," he said. "People hang out on the streets. The crops are good, but people can't afford to buy things." Fishing has declined because of environmental degradation and habitat loss. "Thirty years ago I caught four kinds of sturgeon in the Danube." That was before wetlands on islands and along the riverbanks were diked to create cropland. In spring, when the water was up, the marshlands flooded, providing a place for fish to spawn. If the marshes are restored, the fish will come back. "
That kind of habitat restoration is the goal of three young Bulgarians—Edita Difova, Ivelin Ivanov, and Gradimir Gradev—who work with Green Balkans, a federation of environmental groups. Downriver from Tutrakan the trio gathered one evening atop a concrete bulkhead, part of a system of channels that alternately drain and irrigate a broad swath of former marshland to make it suitable for growing corn and wheat.
"Our goal is to restore the wetlands by cutting the levees, which were built up in the 1950s, and allowing the water back in, Edita said against the sound of cuckoos and a chorus of frogs. Green Balkans owns two abandoned fish farms that it hopes to flood as nationally protected wetlands, primarily as waterfowl habitat, a plan for which the group is seeking private and government funding.
As Edita walked along a dirt roadway, two pygmy cormorants and a flock of white herons flew by in the waning sunlight. A small deer bounded through the fields. "These are second-growth forests," she said. "Were applying for funding to reintroduce the natural species, mainly on the islands." "
Among those islands is Belene, site of a Cold War–era prison where political dissidents were tortured and killed. Belene today remains a prison farm. A scowling young guard opened the gates onto a pontoon bridge that carried us on a teeth-chattering drive to the island. Armed guards are always around, but prisoners move about the island unrestrained as they tend crops and livestock.
""This is one of the biggest and best conserved marshlands in the area," said Edita, who prizes Belene because of its habitat for pelicans, threatened eagle species, herons, and cormorants, and for mammals such as wild boar.
On the coast of the Black Sea lies the river's biggest wetland: the Danube Delta, a labyrinth of channels, streams, oxbows, lakes, forests, and dunes that provides habitat for more than 300 bird species.
This watery land has only a handful of small villages and one city, Tulcea, Romania, from which the delta fans out with three main channels. Sulina Channel, the route for oceangoing vessels, has been dredged and straightened to create a virtual beeline east to the Black Sea.
Only a boat small enough for narrow, shallow waterways can reach the delta's secret places. My craft was a red-and-white runabout called Gipsy, piloted by a rangy, square-jawed young man named Adrian Cacencu. He took me on speedy, exhilarating rides along back channels. We also slowly motored past day huts fashioned by fishermen out of reeds, through marshes where coots skimmed the water, and across lakes that exploded with flights of pelicans.
After we overnighted in the small port of Sulina, I asked Adrian to take me to the Danube's end. We set out just after dawn, with the waves growing bigger and choppier as we went east. Gipsy's hull smacked down harder and harder. With cold, salty spray in our eyes and the lighthouse on our right, we knew we'd hit seawater.
We crossed over to the south channel, passing cows and bulls munching grass on the banks. Then it struck me: The Danube had shown me a variety of colors but never really blue. But here, filtered by the delta's reed beds, the water was a deep, dark indigo. Far from Vienna I had found the beautiful blue Danube. If Gipsy hadn't been so small, I might have stood up and danced.