The Danube aristocracies were big hitters in European history, and the riverbank is rich in their imposing residences, many of them still lived in by the likes of the Hohenzollerns, Saxe-Coburgs, and Habsburgs. These aristocrats derived their income from river users and eventually their castles became surrounded by trading towns such as Ulm, with its giant cathedral tower, and Ingoldstadt – now headquarters of Audi. Regensburg, the Pope’s hometown, still has a waterside that resembles a medieval engraving, enriched with monasteries and cathedrals.
Passau, a favourite of the river cruise business, was where I crossed my first border. Wedged on a narrowing V of land between the Danube and the river Inn, the city looks like something of a cruise liner itself – with steeples and bell towers masquerading as masts and funnels. Just downriver, Austria begins, and here the river is at its most bucolic, particularly in the Wachau region, where the banks steepen and are strung with ancient, hand-tended vineyards and orchards.
After the Wachau, Vienna is an anti-climax for a river follower; the city of the Blue Danube waltz actually thrusts the river out into the suburbs and trammels it between giant embankments. The Slovak capital, Bratislava, also treats it with suspicion, and it isn’t until Budapest that the Danube is welcomed again with open arms to the city centre.
Here the water is busy with cruise boats, strung with suspension bridges and lined with Art Nouveau merchant’s houses that somehow survived a turbulent century. The magnificence of the river-straddling city reflects a once-glorious era when Hungary was partnered with Austria, in a giant and long-lived enterprise, which only finally fell apart with World War I. The loss still rankles.
It was here I finally abandoned my bicycle to continue my journey to the Hungarian border on a horse borrowed from a Hungarian count. And it was on the Serbian side of that border that I finally had my rendezvous with a water horse called the Argo, in the dead of that rainy night.
With the help of the Main-Danube canal, the Argo had plodded all the way across Europe from Rotterdam, and now she was headed for Ruse in Bulgaria, with 1,350 tonnes of China clay on board. She was over a century old, and in her day there had been many more like her, working what the EU now calls ‘the Danube Corridor’. Back then the likes of Austrian shipping company DDSG had a fleet of 200 paddle steamers, for both passengers and freight, but for the greater part of the 20th century the strained relationship between the Upper Danube (democracy) and the Lower Danube (communism) blocked the development of river trade. Which is why many western Europeans know nothing of the Danube below Budapest.
That should have all changed in 1989, but then came the conflict in the Balkans, with the Croats on one bank fighting the Serbs on the other, and Nato’s warplanes destroying the river bridges at Novi Sad in Serbia. So it’s only now we’re beginning to rediscover the Danube.
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