While we were there, we learned that an encampment of the Tsigane (gipsies) was to be seen two or three miles away, and through the Rumanian village, past grassy levels starred with myriads of autumn crocuses, we journeyed to it. The tents were pitched on a bluff above a nearly dry river-bed, in a newly cut maize field. Among the tents, we seemed taken back to a time before even the Romans came. The men with their long curly locks, their clear-cut Phœnician-like profiles, seemed to take us back to times but dimly known, while the nude children, the primitive tents, suggested that we were not far from the period when “wild in woods the naked savage ran,” though these particular “savages” were sophisticated enough to beg with fawning volubility during our stay in their unsavoury encampment.
A few miles inland from Orsova, in a lovely confined valley, is Mehadia (Herkulesbad)—a celebrated “cure,” the hot-springs of which have been celebrated from the times of the Romans.
THE CROWN CHAPEL, ORSOVA
About a couple of miles to the east—across the Cerna—is a remarkable Hungarian shrine, a small chapel approached by a splendid avenue of tall, tapering poplars. This is the Crown Chapel, marking a historic spot. When on the failure of the Hungarian Revolution the leaders had to seek safety in exile, they took with them the crown of St. Stephen and the other regalia, but nearing the frontier they had not the heart to confess the failure of their high ideals by taking the national insignia out of the country, and so sought a wild and lonely spot, still on Hungarian soil, where they dug a deep hole and buried it, each taking a pledge not to reveal its whereabouts without the consent of the rest. Four or five years later, when the national cause seemed hopelessly lost, the whereabouts of the hidden treasure was told to the Emperor of Austria, and the exact place where the precious regalia was buried was found with some difficulty, and the historic articles recovered. Over the spot the Emperor, as king of Hungary, had the small chapel erected. The creeper-clad building stands at the end of a fine poplar avenue at right angles to the road from Orsova to the Rumanian frontier. When I visited it the surroundings had been devastated two or three weeks before by a terrible flood, which had swept down the valley of the Cerna, destroying railway bridges, farms, cottages, and everything in its course. The raised Orsova road had been washed away in great gaps, and all around was muddy desolation. The subsiding waters had left earthy marks some feet up the poplars and other trees, and the grounds about the chapel were deep in soil deposited by the rushing flood, while nearer Orsova so much earth had been swept down by the torrent as to change the position of the Cerna’s outlet into the Danube.
The charmingly natural figure of the Virgin and Child in the Crown Chapel was the work of the Austrian sculptor, Meissner, who, having devoted his life to wordly art, turned at its close to sacred subjects, and died after completing this piece of work. The right hand of the Virgin, having been broken off, has been replaced by the work of an inferior artist.
From near the Crown Chapel the road and railway run closely parallel along the foot of the hills, and on into Rumania. The frontier is formed by the little river Bachna, which flows in through a pleasant valley, and on the further side of this stream is the first Rumanian village of Verciorova. The passenger steamer passes between this place and the long island of Ada Kaleh, which forms one of the most interesting features in this part of the Danube. The island lies about three miles below Orsova, and to reach it a long, heavy row-boat must be taken from the little Orsova bazaar, where the Turks come to sell their tobacco, coffee, sweets, and other wares. The Turkish boatmen, aided by the swift current of the stream, soon cover the distance, and landing on the island we find that we have left Hungary and Servia, and are in a veritable bit of Turkey, “detached,” as the old maps put it.
It was only in 1878 that Ada Kaleh came under the Austro-Hungarian dominion, and it remains a bit of Turkey enislanded in the Danube, with the broad river rushing on either side of it, and the lonely hills of Hungary, Rumania, and Servia encircling it.