The Danube

by Walter Jerrold

Pozsony (Pressburg) was not only, until 1848, the meeting place of the Hungarian Diet, but its cathedral was also the crowning place of the Hungarian kings, who after the ceremony rode on to the Coronation Hill by the Danube, and there took the oath of fidelity to the nation, drawing the sword of St. Stephen, and turning to the four points of the compass, making the sign of the Cross with it, and saying, “I will defend my country, wherever it may be attacked, with this sword which the nation has given into my hands.”

The town no longer sees these sights, for it was deemed advisable to have the capital further away from the frontier, and so the seat of government was removed to Budapest; and it was there that the present Emperor of Austria was crowned king of Hungary in 1867. But if we cannot have the spectacle of the king thus publicly taking the oath of fidelity to his country at the ancient seat of government—and the breaking with such traditions has consequences which those responsible can scarcely gauge—we can visit the old cathedral where the actual coronation took place, and can picture for ourselves within that building something of the scenic splendour once visible there.

Here it may be said that it is a curious fact that, as it is at the first Hungarian town that we reach on journeying down the Danube we thus come in touch with the story of the crown of St. Stephen, so we come in touch with it again when we reach the last town before the river passes from Hungary to Rumania.

To happen, as I did, on my first visit upon a busy market day in Pozsony (Pressburg) is to participate in a scene of animation about which one is tempted to linger. At the top of the irregular market place stand a number of long narrow wagons with basketwork sides, laden with vegetables and drawn by large buff-coloured bullocks. Passing into the crowd of peasants and townsfolk, we see wares displayed on stalls or spread over the ground in a glorious confusion of colour. Roughly, the sellers of commodities seem to classify themselves. At one side of the “Platz” are the sellers of bread in many forms, in another part are to be seen rows of boot and shoe sellers, dealers in drapery and haberdashery. Glancing up a court we may notice a buxom peasant woman trying on a pair of high leather boots reaching above the knees. A little beyond are the dealers in fruit and vegetables; great mounds of dark green melons, like large cannon balls, are piled up, and here and there one that has been cut or broken reveals the beautifully contrasting purplish red of the flesh within; broad baskets or tubs tilted to one side show masses of paprika, the national condiment, a delicate red pepper the rare savour of which some visitors fail to recognize. All round are peasants who have brought in their wares, sometimes of the slightest, that they may make something if it be but a few fillers by the transactions; sometimes the wares consist of but a few handfuls of half-ripe beans of various kinds, sometimes of three or four dozen tomatoes, good, bad, or indifferent. From the vegetables, past the vendors of herbs and of flowers, cut and in pots, we come to rows of women selling butter and cream and cheese, and beyond them are stalls after stalls at which ready cooked geese and ducks are being sold whole or by the half or quarter bird, and beyond these again are the butchers’ booths. At the lower end of the market place live geese and fowls are being disposed of, while under the acacias that surround a statue sits a circle of women each of whom has spread upon the ground by her little heaps of various fungi unknown to English culinary art—“toadstools” of all shapes and sizes and colours. These fungi-sellers are a noticeable feature of many of the markets that we visit, but here and at Ratisbon they seemed more numerous than elsewhere. The whole scene is perhaps typical of many of the markets that may be visited, but it was the busiest of those which I happened to see. One is struck by the absence of any marked characteristics of local costume—the various coloured head kerchiefs are much the same as those to be found in places far apart as Bohemia and northern Spain, two dominant notes of colour being “butchers’ blue” in the women’s gowns, and a warm yellow-brown in the kerchief. Of striking costume but little is to be seen unless the visitor penetrates further from the river highway, or unless he happens upon some special festival.

Though Pozsony (Pressburg) is the second important town in Hungary and the old capital, its closeness to the frontier makes it less peculiarly Magyar in character than towns further inland, and a large proportion of its eighty thousand inhabitants are German. There are, too, judging by one or two of the streets, many Jews in the town, and the fact is further emphasized by the large, new (and ugly) synagogue near the cathedral. The cathedral itself is primarily interesting for its historical association, but its pyramid-topped tower, dating from Roman times and surmounted by the Hungarian crown, is worthy of notice.

One story that is told of a siege of the ancient capital is worth recalling as it suggests a similar incident in a Scots ballad. When King Andrew the First was on the throne in the eleventh century, his kingdom was threatened by Henry the Third, who entered Hungary at the head of a large army and laid vigorous siege to Pozsony maintaining a strict blockade on every side in the hope of starving the inhabitants into submission. As the attack was wholly unexpected and the townspeople therefore unprepared, it looked as if the invaders’ expectation might be realized. But while their force was unable to manage the opening of a passage on the river, their stratagem and the bravery of one man effected it. In the silence of the night a skilful swimmer named Zothmund dropped quietly from the wall into the river and swimming round the enemy’s vessels, bored holes in their sides below the water mark, and before the morning the majority of them were sunk, in spite of all the efforts of their crews, so the Emperor was forced to raise the siege. This is very like the exploit of the cabin-boy of “Ye Gowden Vanitie” who volunteered to sink a “French gallie, as she sailed to the lowlands low.”

Long connected with the south side of the river by such a bridge of boats as was the common means of communication across the Danube, Pozsony has for some years had an iron bridge which serves for both road and railway. It communicates with the woodland Au-Park, which forms a favourite recreation ground for the townsfolk.

Passing under this bridge, the steamer starts upon a long stretch of country marked by the sameness of tree-grown banks and islets, with for many miles little to vary a certain monotony beyond the passing of quaint water-mills, moored singly or in groups of as many as a dozen, now in midstream and now close to the bank. These mills consist of a small wooden house on one boat, with a large water wheel, the lower part submerged, connecting it with another boat. On the shore are frequent little granaries not much larger than the floating mills, both being common objects of the Danube for many miles. Before we reach them, however, it should be pointed out that arms of the river branch off left and right a little below Pozsony and do not rejoin the main stream for a long distance. That on the left forms the Csallóköz island or Grosse Schütt—a rich agricultural island nearly sixty miles long, more than thirty wide at its broadest part, and having scattered about it nearly a hundred villages. The right branch of the Danube, which rejoins earlier, forms the Kleine Schütt. These villages are, however, but infrequently glimpsed from the steamer as the island shores along the main stream are broken up into innumerable islets.

Here we are at one of the shallowest parts of the great river’s course, and exposed banks are not infrequent when the water is low, while the steamer has to pick its channel now close to the right bank and then close to the left—especially as we pass some of the rapids. The islands are said to be rich in wildfowl—which it is easy to believe when we have seen between Pozsony (Pressburg) and Esztergom (Gran) flocks of many hundreds of wild duck.

The first stopping place in the river’s long winding through this plain is Körtvélyes—the steamer station for Somorja (Sommerein), the chief town on the greater island; the next is Bös or Böös, a mere landing place, the town which it serves lying two or three miles inland. Passing the little-varying green banks, broken into islets, with a rare spire seen at a distance over the trees, or an occasional peasant with a small herd of cattle, we reach the end of the smaller of the islands where the river Raba or Raab (with which the Danube branch has united) comes in on the right. The town of the same name, once the frontier town between the Turkish and German empires, is a few miles up that stream—and then, on the same flat and unattractive bank, we reach Gönyö from which local steamers run up to Györ (Raab), an interesting old town, described as peculiarly Hungarian, on the site of the Roman station of Arabona, now an important manufacturing centre with more than forty thousand inhabitants.