Danube

• 1. Introduction

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  The Danube stretches 2,850 kilometres from the Black Forest of Germany to the Black Sea, passing through or bordering ten countries and connecting four national capitals along the way. No other river in the world can claim that last distinction. Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest, and Belgrade all sit on its banks. Its drainage basin covers more than 800,000 square kilometres and is home to 83 million people. It carries huchen, beluga sturgeon, and wels catfish through mountain gorges and broad plains. And its name, in one form or another, appears in the national anthems, folk songs, and literary traditions of a dozen cultures.

  How did a river become a civilisation? That is the question the Danube answers over and over again, across every century of recorded history. From the earliest Neolithic pottery found along its banks to the NATO bombs that dropped three of its bridges in 1999, the river has been simultaneously a highway, a border, a food source, a battlefield, and a muse. The Danube connects things. That has always been both its gift and its burden.

• 2. A Name Older Than Nations

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  Danube is an Old European river name traced to the Celtic words 'Danu' or 'Don,' both names for Celtic gods, and rooted further back in the Proto-Indo-European deh2nu. The same ancient root gave names to the Don, the Dnieper, the Dniester, the Daugava, and half a dozen other European rivers. In Rigvedic Sanskrit, danu means 'fluid' or 'dewdrop.' In Avestan, the same word simply means 'river.' The name is not a label for this particular waterway; it is the oldest word its neighbours had for what water does.

  The ancient Greeks called it the Istros, from a root related to the Iranic word for 'swift.' That name came to them from the Thracians, who lived along the lower river. The Thraco-Phrygian name was Matoas, meaning 'the bringer of luck.' In Latin it was Danubius or Ister, and the Latin name is masculine. The German Donau, by contrast, is feminine; the word was reinterpreted by German speakers as containing the suffix -ouwe, meaning 'wetland.' Romanian is also an exception, using the feminine Dunarea, which scholars suggest may derive not from Latin but from a hypothetical Thracian form called Donaris, or possibly from a Turkic borrowing via the Cumans or Pechenegs.

  The Middle Mongolian name for the river was transcribed as Tho-na, a rendering recorded in 1829 by Jean-Pierre Abel-Remusat. Across more than twenty modern languages, every form of the name traces back to that same ancient Indo-European root, which in Scythian may have simply meant 'river' as a generic term. The Sami word Deatnu, one of the river's names, translates as 'Great River.' Whatever the language, the meaning underneath is always the same: moving water.

• 3. The River's Physical World

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  At Donaueschingen in Germany, the rivers Brigach and Breg join in a palace park to form the Danube. The Breg, the longer of the two headstreams, rises in Furtwangen im Schwarzwald. From there the river runs southeast through Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova, and Ukraine before emptying through the Danube Delta into the Black Sea.

  Geologically the Danube is much older than the Rhine, which competes with it for the same southern German catchment. Before the last ice age, the waters from the Alps that today feed the Rhine actually flowed east into a predecessor river called the Urdonau, or original Danube. Its ancient, waterless canyon beds are still visible in the landscape of the Swabian Alb. Rhine erosion eventually captured those Alpine waters, leaving today's upper Danube as what geologists call an underfit stream.

  The Swabian Alb is largely porous limestone, and the Rhine's level sits much lower than the Danube's. As a result, on many summer days, when the Danube carries little water, it disappears entirely into underground channels at two locations called the Donauversickerung, the Danube Sink. Most of that water resurfaces 12 kilometres south at a spring called the Aachtopf, Germany's highest-flow wellspring at an average of 8,500 litres per second, and from there it feeds the Rhine rather than the Black Sea. Because of this ongoing underground drainage, geologists predict that the upper Danube course will one day vanish entirely, consumed by the Rhine in a process called stream capturing.

  The river is divided into three main sections, separated by gorges where it cuts through mountains. The upper section runs to the Devin Gate at the Austria-Slovakia border; the middle section, crossing the Pannonian or Carpathian Basin, runs to the Iron Gates at the Serbia-Romania border; the lower section extends to the delta. At the Iron Gates, a gorge forms part of the border between Serbia and Romania. On the 13th of April 2006, the peak discharge there reached 15,400 cubic metres per second, a recorded record. The highest point in the entire drainage basin is the summit of Piz Bernina at the Italy-Switzerland border, standing at 4,049 metres.

• 4. Border of Empire

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  Darius the Great, king of Persia, crossed the Danube in the late 6th century BCE to invade European Scythia. Alexander the Great reached the river in 336 BCE, defeating the Triballian king Syrmus along with Thracian and Illyrian tribes.

  Under Roman rule the river became a frontier of the Empire that ran almost from the Danube's source to its mouth. From 37 CE through the reign of Emperor Valentinian I, who ruled from 364 to 375, the Danubian Limes served as the northeastern border, with interruptions including its fall in 259. The crossing into Dacia was achieved in two battles in 102, followed by a second campaign in 106 after the construction of a bridge in 101 near the garrison town of Drobeta at the Iron Gate. That victory over the Dacian king Decebalus allowed Rome to establish the Province of Dacia, which was abandoned by Emperor Aurelian in 271.

  The Avars used the river as their southeastern border in the 6th century. Between the late 14th and late 19th centuries, the Ottoman Empire competed with the Kingdom of Serbia, the Second Bulgarian Empire, the Kingdom of Hungary, and later with the Habsburg monarchy, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the Russian Empire for control of the river they called Tuna. The Danube served as the northern border of the Ottoman Empire for centuries, and the wars fought along it were among the most consequential in European history. The list includes the Battle of Nicopolis in 1396, the Siege of Belgrade in 1456, the Battle of Mohacs in 1526, the first Turkish Siege of Vienna in 1529, the Battle of Vienna in 1683, and the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878.

  During 1944, while the Arrow Cross Party briefly governed Hungary, large numbers of people, mostly Jewish, were killed along the river in Budapest. Their remains were discovered during a 2011 renovation of the Margaret Bridge.

• 5. Routes and Waterways

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  Since ancient times the Danube has been a traditional trade route across Europe, and 2,415 kilometres of its total length remain navigable today. Ocean ships can reach Braila in Romania, the limit of the maritime sector; river ships can continue to Kelheim in Bavaria; smaller craft can go further upstream to Ulm.

  The German Rhine-Main-Danube Canal, completed in 1992, is about 171 kilometres long and links the Danube at Kelheim with the Main at Bamberg, creating a trans-European waterway that runs 3,500 kilometres from Rotterdam on the North Sea to Sulina on the Black Sea. In 1994 the Danube was declared one of ten Pan-European transport corridors. The amount of goods carried on the river reached about 100 million tons in 1987. In 1999, NATO bombing during the Kosovo War destroyed three bridges in Serbia, severely disrupting navigation. Debris clearance was completed in 2002, and a temporary pontoon bridge that blocked river traffic was removed in 2005.

  Three artificial waterways branch from the Danube: the Danube-Tisa-Danube Canal network in the Vojvodina region of northern Serbia; the 64-kilometre Danube-Black Sea Canal between Cernavoda and Constanta in Romania, finished in 1984, which shortens the route to the Black Sea by 400 kilometres; and the Rhine-Main-Danube Canal. In the Austrian and German sections, a traditional flat-bottomed boat called a Zille was developed for river work; these craft are still used for fishing and transport. About 60 of the Danube's tributaries are also navigable.

  In the 19th century, The Times of London described the river as 'annually swept by ice that will lift a large ship out of the water or cut her in two as if she were a carrot.' That hazard shaped the long campaign to canalize sections of the river. Germany accounts for five locks and Austria for ten. Downstream of the Iron Gate locks, the river flows freely for more than 860 kilometres to the Black Sea.

• 6. Fish, Delta, and Ecology

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  The Danube basin is home to pike, zander, huchen, wels catfish, burbot, tench, diverse carp and sturgeon, salmon, and trout. In the delta and lower river, euryhaline species such as European seabass, mullet, and eel are also found. The upper Danube ecoregion alone holds about 60 fish species; the lower Danube-Dniester ecoregion has about twice as many.

  Six species of sturgeon once populated the basin: beluga, Russian sturgeon, bastard sturgeon, sterlet, starry sturgeon, and European sea sturgeon. All are now threatened, and the European sea sturgeon has largely or entirely disappeared from the river. Sturgeons had been commercially exploited for meat and caviar since the 5th century BCE. The construction of Iron Gates I in 1974 and Iron Gates II in 1984 created barriers for migratory species without including any fish passage facility. Spawning areas were dramatically reduced. A project called We Pass is currently reviewing the possibility of a fish passage to allow migration, including for sturgeon. The huchen, one of the largest salmon species and endemic to the Danube basin, has been introduced elsewhere by humans.

  The Danube Delta is the largest river delta in the European Union. The greater part lies in Romania's Tulcea county, with the northern section in Ukraine's Odesa Oblast. Its approximate surface area is 4,152 square kilometres, of which 3,446 square kilometres are in Romania. Including the related Razim-Sinoe lagoon system adds another 1,015 square kilometres, bringing the total to 5,165 square kilometres. The delta became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1991 and is also a Ramsar Site. Its lakes and marshes support 45 freshwater fish species, and its wetlands host migratory birds of over 300 species, including the endangered pygmy cormorant. Canalization and drainage schemes, including the Bystroye Canal, threaten these habitats.

  The International Commission for the Protection of the Danube River was established in 1998 and draws in 14 member states plus the European Union. Its mandate covers the entire basin, including tributaries and groundwater, aiming to implement the Danube River Protection Convention.

• 7. In Folklore and Art

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  Johann Strauss wrote The Blue Danube Waltz, known today across the world and used widely as a lullaby. The Romanian composer Iosif Ivanovici, who lived from 1845 to 1902, wrote The Waves of the Danube, a waltz that became internationally known as the Anniversary Song; it has been performed by Al Jolson, Rosemary Clooney, Vera Lynn, Tom Jones, and many others. Joe Zawinul composed a symphony called Stories of the Danube, performed for the first time at the 1993 Bruckner festival in Linz.

  The Danube appears in the Bulgarian national anthem as a symbol of the country's natural beauty. In Lithuanian folk songs, the river name Dunojus appears more often than the name of Lithuania's own longest river, the Neman. Old Romanian folk songs describe a white monastery on a white island with nine priests, tied to the ancient tradition of the holy island of Leuke, where one version of the legend of Achilles places his burial.

  The German and Austrian tradition of landscape painting known as the Danube school developed in the 16th century in the Danube valley. Claudio Magris published a book simply called Danube in 1986, a large cultural-historical essay tracing the river from its sources to the delta, following European ethnic and literary history along the way. The Great Danube Adventure appeared in 1838 as an epic travel diary. Jules Verne's The Danube Pilot, published in 1908, follows a fisherman named Serge Ladko on a journey down the river. Algernon Blackwood's short story 'The Willows' is set mostly on the river's surface.

  The ancient lower Danube was known to the Greeks as the Keras Okeanoio, the Gulf or Horn of Okeanos, referenced by Apollonius Rhodos in the Argonautica. To this day one of the Danube's mouths is called Chilia, preserving a trace of the mythological geography that once surrounded the river's most remote reaches.