Read Online The Danube by Nick Thorpe - Free Book Online Page B

and sells them wholesale to the shops. The fish will go for four times that price in the markets of Constanța and Bucharest.
    I decline a lift back to town with Sorin, and set out on foot down a street of neat peasant houses, wood panelled, painted pastel shades of blue and green. Black rowing boats that will never again go to sea are beached in back gardens and yards, keel up, elegant as musical instruments in their final resting places. Hens roost in some, children play in others.
    Ilie Sidurenko and his wife are in their front garden, pruning the vines. ‘So you're going upriver, like the sturgeon!’ he remarks with delight, when I tell him about my journey. ‘The sturgeon is a smart fish, if he smells nets, you can't catch him … The best time is when the bed of the river or the sea is muddy, and he gets confused. We used to lay hooks, three, five, seven kilometres out to sea. Only the older fishermen knew the secret, and now it is not passed on, it will be lost.’ He hardly interrupts his work, methodically tying his vines as we speak. The biggest sturgeon he ever caught was a male, 400 kilos, ‘not a long fish, but a fat one!’ Then in December 2004, just before Christmas, he was alone on the Danube – a rare event, as the fishermen always fish in pairs. He landed a female, 209 kilos, with 35 kilos of caviar. ‘I sold it to the fish-collecting centre in the village,’ says Ilie, showing no emotion. ‘I don't care what they did with it.’

CHAPTER 3
    Mountains of the Fathers
    We came to the town known by the name of Baba Saltuq. They relate that this Saltuq was an ecstatic devotee (dervish), although things are told of him which are reproved by the Divine Law. This is the last of the towns possessed by the Turks, and between it and the territory of the Greeks is a journey of eighteen days through an uninhabited waste, for eight days of which there is no water.
    I BN B ATTUTA , FOURTEENTH-CENTURY TRAVELLER 1
    S OUTH OF Tulcea on the road to Constanța is the town of Babadag. There are woods, unusual for the bare, rolling landscape of Dobrogea, fresh water springs, a hotel and restaurant with a rather Turkish feel, and the oldest mosque in Romania. The Polish writer Andrzej Stasiuk got here before I did, and wrote a book called The Road to Babadag , 2 but his book is about his journey there, not his arrival.
    In my suitcase I carry an old, red hardback copy of The Travels of Ibn Battuta , an Islamic traveller of the fourteenth century. He reached Babadag in 1332 and used his time to re-provision his caravan for the long journey south to Constantinople, still in the ‘territory of the Greeks’, before the Ottoman conquest of 1453. ‘A provision of water is laid in for this stage, and carried in large and small skins on the wagons. Since our entry into it was in the cold weather, we have no need of much water, and the Turks carry milk in large skins, mix it with cooked dugi and drink that so that they feel no thirst. At this city we made our preparations for the crossing of the wasteland.’
    Babadag means ‘the mountain of the father’ in Turkish. Just a few kilometres inland from the Black Sea, its relationship to the Danube is hard to define. As a centre of miracles and a place of pilgrimage for devout Muslims, the small wooded hill towers over the surrounding landscape, guarding the southern approaches to the river. Nearby, the US military share a training ground with the Romanian army, to practise manoeuvres for the next wars in the Islamic heartlands as though hoping to tap some of its magic. Videos posted on the internet show spidermen in combat fatigues, weighed down with a paraphernalia of gadgets and weaponry, leaping from helicopters and taking cover behind tanks. The ‘father’ in the name is Sari Saltuq, who arrived here with forty warriors by flying carpet from Central Anatolia, according to one source, to convert Dobrogea to Islam. Many wonders are told about him, not least that he saved the