Category: Budapest to the Black Sea 2008

Reminiscences 2024

At some point short of the Black Sea, we transferred to a bus to get to Constanta, the oldest city in Romania, a port on the Black Sea.  The city has paid homage to Ovid, who apparently was exiled here; to Trajan, who conquered the area; to Neptune (beaches); and to Mammon, with gambling casinos.  God gets his/her due with Orthodox Cathedrals (Romanian speaking), a great Synagogue from the early 20th century, and a mosque from the same period.  While there seems to be a channel from the Danube to the Black Sea, most cruises, including Tauck’s, do not use it.  Even so, the city boasts a lighthouse that dates from 1300, built by Genoese sailors. A town hall turned Museum of Archeology houses many other Roman ruins.

It was about 150 miles from Constanta to Bucharest, where we would spend the rest of our tour.  Before being conquered by Trajan, the Dacians had hegemony for several hundred years.  While keeping the ties with Rome (Romania and a romance language), Romanian was part of the pinball politics of the Balkans, emerging as a country in 1878 at the Treaty of Berlin, where it was midwifed from the Ottoman Empire.  Choosing (naturally) a German prince as king, it was a kingdom until after World War II, when it joined the Nazis and was overrun by the Soviet Union.  It’s not anomalous that one of the top places recommended in Trip Advisor is the parliament building, a product of the Ceausescu regime; known as the Palace of the Parliament, it is touted as the 3rd biggest administrative building and the heaviest building in the world.  I have no idea who weighed it.  Ceausescu peaked in 1968 when he spoke up in favor of the Czechs who sought out of the Soviet bloc, and bottom in 1989 when he was overthrown and executed as Romania threw off the Communist yoke.  The city itself has some charming areas, including a museum with 250 “typical Romanian” buildings, including wooden churches typical of Timisoara and Baia Mare that made me consider strongly visiting northern Romania sometime.

The castles in Sinaia and Brasov   merited a visit as well. Sinaia, centered around a 17th century monastery named for Mount Sinai, became the site of the Castle built for King Carol I, a German prince named king of Romania.  Of course, the wealthy followed suit, joining him in the less steamy uplands. Vlad the impaler (better known as Dracula) also built a castle in Bucharest in 1459 that is being excavated.

One nice feature of these “ex post facto” blogs is that I know that I did take advantage of a trip to northern Romania, where I not only saw the original wooden churches in situ, but also got to Lvov.

Reminiscences 2024

Downstream from Osijek, there weren’t many stops at cities on the Danube.

Cruising the Danube meant going through the Iron Gates, an 83 mile stretch that includes four gorges, remembrances of Trajan’s efforts to subdue the barbarians along the river, and a modern carving of Decebalus, the king who fought the Domitian and Trajan in a vain effort to preserve Dacia.  It was commissioned by a Romanian businessman in the 1990s and took ten years to complete the 180 statue.  Ironically, across the river, on the Serbian side, there’s a plaque marking Trajan’s military road.  The Romanian wanted to carve a Roman emperor on that side, but Serbia refused.  The gorges, like their counterparts on the Yangtze, were tamed by a dam which smoothed rapids and made navigation easier.

Bulgaria included a trip to the capital of the Second Bulgar Empire (1180 until the early 1400s, though by that time it was a shadow of the landmass that stretched from the Baltic to the central Balkans).  The entry in Wikipedia makes the history sound like almost constant warfare with and against the Byzantines until finally succumbing to the Ottomans.

Tarnovo aka Tarnovograd became Veliko Tarnovo in 1965–Great Tarnovo–to honor its historical importance in the first and second Bulgarian Empires.  In 1879, delegates here voted to move the capital to Sofia, but in 1908 Tsar Ferdinand (born a German prince) formally declared Bulgaria independent.

There was a bizarre stop on the way back to the boat: it was the Buzludzha monument, a monstrosity opened in 1981 to celebrate socialism and communism in Bulgaria.  It has not been maintained since the fall of the party, however. Looks like a spaceship!

Reminiscences 2024

One of the miracles to me of World War II was the creation of a south Slav kingdom in the Balkans, replacing one of the tinder boxes that had triggered wars before erupting in World War I.  But that had blown up in the ethnic rivalries after the death of Tito, and the bitter fighting of 1991-1995  could be seen in several towns along the river.  Our first stop in Croatia was Osijek, as in so many Danubian towns, a one-time Roman colony.  The town began around the 12th century, and was occupied by the Turks for over 150 years.  Austrian authorities built a fortress, Tvrda, that is still one of the landmarks of the town of about 100,000.  Baroque churches, a town square, a monument of gratitude for ending the plague–checks all the boxes.  Croatian Serbian tensions led to Croatia siding with the Nazis.

Belgrade, capital of Serbia, and one of the most continuously occupied cities in Europe was our next stop.  The city of over one million changed hands between Rome, Byzantium, the Frankish kingdom,  Bulgarian Kingdom, and the Ottomans. The Serbian Revolution led to independence by 1841.  Because of Belgrade’s strategic location, the city has been in 115 wars, razed 44 times, bombed 5 times and besieged many times, according to Wikipedia.  One of those five times was the 1999 “accident” when the Americans strafed the Chinese embassy.  Amazing anything is left.  The synagogue dates from the 1920s, and the major Serbian Orthodox Church, St. Stava, begun in the 1930s, was not completed until the 1980s.  Still, I overlooked the Sava River where the guns of August (1914) began World War I.

Reminiscences 2024

In 2008, we toured with Tauck from Budapest to the Black Sea.  In trying to recreate that trip, I might have to include some things documented elsewhere (e.g., blog from 2009, which I reconstructed first).  Budapest, like Vienna, was once the capital of a much larger country, especially after the creation of the dual Monarchy (Austria-Hungary)  in 1867.  Consequently, it has a disproportionate amount of imperial trappings: a  huge Parliament building) and from previous periods, impressive churches, remnants of a large Jewish community that was active in Zionist causes from their 3000 seat Moorish style synagogue, and a castle that was mostly trashed in the World War II battles to reclaim the city from the Nazis.

Many of the additions were built around the time of the centennial of settlement by Arpad and his Magyars.  One of the finest is the Opera House.  It had a box for Emperor Franz Joseph.  I’ve been there with Carolyn for Scheherazade, and with students for a Mahler.  It was on our tour.  The sphinx-like lions guard the entrants and keep riff raff out (sometimes).

There’s a cute subway (second in the world after London) that is cheap.  However, you’re in real trouble if you don’t have your ticket handy.  Undercover cops nailed someone on our time.

And some good Hungarian food.  There was a big covered food court that we could not resist. Paprika rules.

As we went down the Danube, our next stop was at a showplace that featured Magyars–horses and riders who demonstrated why the Magyars came, saw, and conquered (but not why they lost much of the country to the Turks and had to throw in their lot with the Austrians.  The place we stopped was probably Kalocsa, known for horses, and claiming to be the “Paprika Capital of the World.”  The latter claim is interesting, because paprika originated in Mexico.  And the Magyars originated in the Tarim Basin.  They met in Hungary, on the Great Hungarian Plain.

When we got back on the boat, I learned that Tauck’s fees are really all inclusive.  It was take any pictures of you from the table.  And later it was all gratuities included, even washroom fees.

 

Reminiscences 2024 An overview

I thought I had documented this trip, too, but alas, I have little record of it, other than a note from Bratislava about poor connectivity.  It was our initial Tauck tour, and I soon realized this was truly upscale: there was no tipping period.  Everything was included in the price. Everything!  That included the price of the toilets.  We stopped, I remember, in Hungary to be treated to the skills of current Magyars, those Asian plainsmen who stormed into Europe in the 9th or 10th century and dominated the Hungarian plains.  There was the usual photographer, and I ducked the pictures because in the past we’d get off a trip and the pictures would be available for sale.  In this case, however, the pictures were on a table with a “help yourself note.”

We got to parts of Eastern Europe not otherwise easily accessible.  Belgrade, for example, where World War I had its foreplay.  One site was the grave of Tito, who helped liberate Yugoslavia from Nazi oppression, then tightroped his way between East and West.  Still venerated for his magic in uniting the South Slavs, even if the breakup of the Kingdom of Serbs and Croats is ongoing and bitter.  Some of the cities we visited still bore the marks of the wars that followed the splintering of the country.  Another highlight were the remains of a Bulgarian city that marked the height of the Bulgar kingdom as a power in the Balkans.  And finally, the Dobruja, where the Danube flowed into the Black Sea.  Constanta, city of Ovid’s exile, with the  other Roman ruins that signified Dacia, the Roman province that gave Romania its name (the “gates” on the Danube).  I’ll share some pictures from that trip.