Riding the Danube Express Through Istanbul and Budapest

Views on BG | June 12, 2011, Sunday // 15:00
Bulgaria: Riding the Danube Express Through Istanbul and Budapest Entrance gate to the Tsarevets Castle, central Bulgaria. Photo by The Telegraph

Ian Cowie travels on the Danube Express through Turkey and Hungary, a journey of ancient capitals, enchanting landscapes and sinister historical echoes.

The Telegraph

Imagine a train journey through time. Crossing cultural, political and religious conflicts spanning not just centuries but millennia. No, you don't need to be Doctor Who to take this trip; all you need is a ticket for the Danube Express.

Eight carriages will transport you and up to 41 fellow travellers between Istanbul and Budapest, winding their way from the Bosporus on the shores of Asia, over the Carpathian Mountains and across the wide Hungarian plains.

The Balkans have been a battleground for thousands of years, where Muslims and Christians, patriots, Nazis, communists and capitalists clashed to make history.

Much of this dramatic past is still visible, for good or ill, day and night, from the windows of the sleeping cabins or the restaurant and lounge car, complete with on-board piano. It is a curious experience, to say the least, to watch the derelict factories that litter the Romanian rust belt slide by, as you drink and eat to the cheerful tunes of Cole Porter.

Bulgaria, like Romania, became a member of the European Union in January, 2007. But you can still see heavily laden horse-drawn carts on its country tracks and children playing by streams and ditches choked with plastic bags. There is nothing picturesque about post-Soviet rural poverty.

On a brighter note, there is extraordinary beauty in many other aspects of the passing scenery. Sunflowers stretch as far as the eye can see before being replaced by orchards of walnut and cherries. There is the majesty of the river that gives this train its name and several delightful surprises, even for fairly experienced travellers.

For example, I confess I had never heard of Veliko Turnovo. Reading that this had been the medieval capital of Bulgaria gave me little idea of what to expect: a perfectly preserved walled city perched precipitously above the ravines of the meandering Yantra river. Chapels and churches endowed by crusaders, coming or going to the Holy Land, are scattered around its dominant feature, Tsarevets Castle.

One of the good things about the Danube Express, unlike better-known trains that travel through this region, is that there is time to get off and walk about to see things close up. So, for example, we were able to wander around Veliko Turnovo and enjoy a former capital of a European country where the all-too-familiar exploitation of holidaymakers has barely begun.

Yes, there were plenty of shops, pitching for the trade of the passing traveller, but very little plastic tat. Most shops sold local ceramics, such as brightly enamelled jugs and plates, or woodwork, brasswork and paintings of local scenes. More sinister were streetside stalls selling Nazi daggers, compasses and other kit, left behind by a defeated army fleeing one of the bloodiest theatres of the Second World War. The decades of communism that followed seem to have preserved this place from commercialisation, even after the iron curtain collapsed.

Veliko Turnovo is well worth going out of your way to visit if you seek something different. Which is just what Danube Express founder Howard Trinder had in mind when he set about converting and refurbishing former Hungarian and East German rolling stock.

"This is a way to experience parts of eastern Europe that you would not otherwise see, to visit unusual destinations, some of which are almost unknown in Britain," he told me. "This is a hotel train where you can get out and go sightseeing. It is also unlike its competitors in that each of the new compartments in our deluxe sleeping cars have air-con, an en suite shower and lavatory and side-by-side beds rather than bunk beds.

"We also decided to be different from those trains which expect their customers to dress up in black ties and the like for dinner," said Trinder. "We believe it's your holiday and it's your choice about what to wear."

That makes lots of sense, given the amount of walking we did before, after and during the train trip. First, we enjoyed a couple of days in Turkey's capital. Istanbul was the wealthiest city in Europe for most of the Middle Ages. Today, it remains by far its biggest metropolis, if you count that portion of the population which lives in Asia, because this city spans two continents.

Successive generations of inhabitants – pagans, Christians, Muslims and Jews – have been thankful for their good fortune, building some of the most spectacular places of worship on the planet. Hagia Sophia – at first a church, then a mosque and now a museum – was the largest cathedral in the world for more than a millennium.

Sheer size is by no means its only remarkable feature. Brilliantly enamelled tiles testify to extraordinary artistry in ceramics, which remain a major local industry. Other fine examples of this craft can be enjoyed at the Blue Mosque and the Topkapi Palace. Bring binoculars.

Outside on the street, Balkan tobacco, black coffee and sweat mingled on the breeze off the Bosporus, a choppy strip of water, ploughed by ships of all sizes travelling between the Black Sea and the Marmara Sea.

We had a fine view of these shipping lanes to port as our train pulled out of Sirkeci station and headed toward southern Bulgaria on the third day of our trip. First stop, after the border, was Kazanlak, which used to supply rip-off Kalashnikov rifles to third-world regimes seeking a cheaper option to the licensed Russian originals. Today it is seeking to reinvent itself as a centre of the rose oil trade. Very big in Japan, apparently.

When we visited a nearby Thracian tomb, listed as a Unesco World Heritage Site, we were the only people there – apart from the security staff. There were a few more visitors at the Shipka Memorial Church, a haunting monument to a spectacularly bloody battle where even corpses were pressed into use as weapons.

Back on the train, we passed deserted stations and a military compound filled with dusty tanks which didn't look as if they had moved in a long time. Conical haystacks, raised off the ground on short stilts, are another oddity of rural Romania.

We stopped at Brasov, where grim Soviet architecture gives way to open fields on higher ground and the 14th-century Bran Castle guards the pass between Transylvania and Moldavia. There is some dispute about what – if anything – Dracula had to do with these bijoux towers. Vlad Tepes, a local bad boy upon whom the Dracula myth seems to have been founded, was born nearby in Sighisoara. But such historical niceties matter little now, amid the bottles of vampire sauvignon, rubber masks and gothic capes.

Six days into our trip, we entered Nyugati station, Budapest. Before leaving the train, I had better mention the 14 splendid Hungarian staff – yes, one for every three passengers – whose adherence to old-fashioned service with a smile may prove a refreshing novelty for travellers used to British trains. They stowed our beds away while we had breakfast in the restaurant car each morning, so our wood-panelled cabin could serve as a sitting room during the day, before breaking out the beds again while we ate dinner.

Our first stop in Budapest was its Children's Railway:seven miles (11km) of narrow-gauge track across the wooded Buda Hills, run by a part-time team of 800 school-age volunteers. Our guide, Andrea, explained that it was set up to help large numbers of orphans after the war and has kept running since. She added, "See, not everything the Russians did was bad."

Much was bad though, as demonstrated by the only museum I have ever visited which had a bouncer on the door. The House of Terror was the headquarters of the communist secret police after they kicked the Nazi torturers out of it in 1945. You start on the second floor and work your way down to the basement, acutely aware that the awful things described – and often photographed – happened in the same space in which you are standing.

The central theme seems to be the evil equivalence of these political extremes. You can see why the curators are careful about who gets in. History in Hungary and the Balkans is not as distant or as safe as it seems in Western Europe; they're still making it over there.

We need your support so Novinite.com can keep delivering news and information about Bulgaria! Thank you!

Views on BG » Be a reporter: Write and send your article
Tags: danube, Bulgaria, Romania, Istanbul, turkey, Budapest, Hungary

Advertisement
Advertisement
Bulgaria news Novinite.com (Sofia News Agency - www.sofianewsagency.com) is unique with being a real time news provider in English that informs its readers about the latest Bulgarian news. The editorial staff also publishes a daily online newspaper "Sofia Morning News." Novinite.com (Sofia News Agency - www.sofianewsagency.com) and Sofia Morning News publish the latest economic, political and cultural news that take place in Bulgaria. Foreign media analysis on Bulgaria and World News in Brief are also part of the web site and the online newspaper. News Bulgaria