Our Danube

2024.05.15. 12:55

It is our Danube, say the Germans, Slovaks, Romanians and we Hungarians, but how can you own such a huge, flowing river. While we try to capture its essence with metaphors - highlighting its function as bridge and border - sometimes with the epithets of queen, sometimes with the epithet of king, perhaps it would be enough to appreciate this wonderful, living river.

Impressions of the Danube

„The Danube is not a thing, not its water, not its water molecules, not its perilous riverbed, the Danube is the Whole, the Danube is the Form.”–Péter Esterházy, The Glance of Countess Hahn-Hahn (down the Danube)

But what is our Danube like? Europe's second longest river meanders through 10 countries. The entire territory of Hungary lies within its watershed, and its main branch here is some 417 kilometres long.

Where does it take its source? The Romans already knew that the source of the Danube was in the Black Forest, but the exact location was not so clear. If you look at a map, you can see that it is the confluence of two small streams, the Breg and the Brigach, which become the Danube as we know it at Donaueschingen, and then meanders 2,850 kilometres to the Black Sea.

The urban river, which flows in a deliberate flow, is of course incomparable to its swirling form in the Danube bend. Also the Danube in Paks also shows a very different face from its counterparts in Vienna and Bratislava.

In Budapest in the 1970s, the water quality of the Danube was so bad that bathing was banned throughout the city. This ban remained in place for a long time, as did the questionable cleanliness of the river. But bathing in the Danube is a great thing, and always has been, according to contemporary photographs. It was possible to swim in the Roman Beach, Nagymaros or Zebegény, in fact on the 3.5 kilometre stretch from the Újpest railway bridge to the city border.

For example, the first golden age of the Roman beach was after the First World War, and its popularity is illustrated by the fact that in the early 1920s there was only one boat garage, but by 1925 there were already 3,000 vehicles in the mushrooming boathouses on the beach. Perhaps the most famous were owned by Mihály Magasházy, János Fojt and Károly Bürgermeister.

World War II put an end to this idyllic atmosphere: many boathouses were destroyed by bombing and the wood was used for fuel. In addition to the war, flooding caused more damage, as ice floes piled up on the wreckage of a blown-up railway bridge meant that it was not only the coastal areas that were flooded. After the war, life quickly returned to the banks of the Roman beach, with deprivatisationed holiday resorts and boat garages replacing private boathouses.

The Danube Terrace was one of the former catering establishments on th Roman Riverbank which were until the aforementioned restrictions, highly frequented. The last open beach was closed in 1973, and visitors were then forced to use the swimming pools for which they had to pay.

The only change came in the 2010s, when the water quality of the Danube was once again good enough for bathing. It took barely a decade to finally open the Roman open-air beach for a one-day period in 2019 and 2020, and for a month in 2021 and 2022, and to make bathing legal again. Let's hope this year will be no different.

TÉ

translated by László Gönczi

Sources:

https://pestbuda.hu

Száraz Miklós György: Duna, Mítoszok Dunája – a Duna mítosza, Scolar, Budapest, 2002.

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