The bridge which crosses the Danube and the Bulgarian-Rumanian frontier from Ruse to Giurgiu is named in honour of friendship, and proclaims that with its 2,224 metres in length it is the longest in Europe after the bridge crossing the Tagus at Lisbon. Grigore Ureche, the ancient chronicler, said that Rumanian territory lies “on the road to evil”, meaning that it is in the path of the invasions which for centuries rolled over Eastern Europe. Not only the impact of the Jazyges, the Roxolans, the Avars, the Kumans and the Pechenegs, but also the banal misunderstandings and mistakes of everyday life can wound and draw blood. Rumanian peasants are able to shrug and say “That’s life” in the face of every incomprehensible move on the part of destiny, and perhaps it would be as well to equip ourselves with that submissiveness to evanescent time which Zamfirescu, poet of the countryside, so admired in them.
Resignation seems to be a cliché of the Rumanian spirit, confirmed not only by facile orators and sentimental versifiers. Even Mihail Sadoveanu, the vigorous fiction-writer whose work comprises a national epic, writes in 1905 of his people as naturally inclined to accept their destiny, while Cioran praises the vocation of his people for wearing chains, for its restraint in bowing under the yoke, and “the nobility of our bondage”. A bowed head, proudly announces a Rumanian proverb, is not cut off; and George Coşbuc, poet, peasant and patriot, states in his song In oppressores that, “abused, flogged, spat on, we accepted shame and ruin as a destiny.”
Ever since the popular ballad Mioriţa, a song about mildness ready to be sacrificed, this “yes” to destiny has been extolled as the expression of an innate gentleness, a vocation for peace. The ideological History of the Rumanian People, written by a team under the direction of the academician Andrei Otetea, traces a “human feeling”, the indication of a “hard-working, profoundly democratic” people who never had any desire to dominate other peoples, as far back as the Dacia of Decebalus, the awesome and brilliant adversary of the Emperor Trajan; the History does at the same time view the unification of Dacia by King Burebistas in the first century A.D. as the first step in the direction not only of Socialism in general, but of President Ceausescu’s regime in particular.
This gentle, melancholy idyll is dear to the hearts even of scholars who show independence from the Party line. When it comes to reconstructing the events of many centuries, the history of Rumania as presented by Dinu C. Giurescu, with his fresh approach, is pervaded with the harmony of the countryside and the odour of the woods described at the beginning of the book, as if in accord with the eternal flux of life and at the same time with the advent of history and the continuing factor of transience. That gentle, harmonious landscape has known tragedy and violence: in his novels Zaharia Stancu describes a troubled, angry Danube, foaming with struggles and history; he describes the hungry, bare-foot peasants coarsened by slavery but capable of rising with fire and steel, as in the great rebellion of 1907, and of displaying an intelligence that has not been dazzled by oppression masquerading as destiny.
It is the road to evil, said the chronicler, the road of the curved sabre when the Getae clash with Roman swords; of the Macedonian infantry advancing beyond the Danube (in Arrian’s account), bending down the tall, thick-standing wheat with their long lances to open a passage for the cavalry; of the iron sword worshipped as a god by the Scythians; of young boys kidnapped by the Turks and the wooden yoke of the Ottomans exchanged (in the words of the historian Michai Cserey) for other yokes of iron. It is the road of the corn and the rushes burnt by Stephen the Great of Moldavia to hold up the advance of Mohammed II, of peasants oppressed and tortured, of slaughter and pillage, bondage and violence. We have borne bridle and yoke, says a poem by Coşbuc, and we bear them still.
The evil is that of having too much history, being a cross-roads, or at least an optional stop on the route of universal history, along which the slaughterhouses work overtime even in the minor centres. According to a saying attributed some years ago to Chancellor Kreisky, Austria has withdrawn from history and is very happy about it. Every good heir or descendant of the Hapsburg Empire is disappointed to find himself in the great theatre of the world, on the stage of world history to which he has been sent to play a bit-part by powers as capricious as the genies and spirits of the old folk-magic Viennese comedies. Lacking Tamino’s self-confidence, and doubtful of the protection afforded him by benevolent higher powers, the walk-on actor would dearly like to get off the stage and, without being too obvious about it, find an exit through the wings.
Rather than leading towards a hypothetical exit, our steps seem to sink into a yielding, friable soil, as when we put a foot on a layer of leaf-mould, that slips beneath our weight and traps our shoe in another, deeper layer, in the leaves that fell last year and have crumbled into damp earth. In order to reconstruct the complete course of his country’s history and civilization, the great historian Nicola Iorga ventured into the most impenetrable depths of the people’s lives, depths which have left no memory in written records, in the documents drawn up by the learned or by the upper classes of the past, but only in forms and customs, gestures and everyday actions which are rooted in the centuries.
Descending into the depths of this humus and, as it were, going back down the path taken by the sap that rises from the roots to the branches and the leaves, Iorga discovered layers that were ancient and buried, but still fertile in living substance, such as traces of the Ottoman migration and, still further back, that of the Turanian peoples from the heart of Asia towards the mythical “Land of Rum”. Bianca Valota Cavallotti, his grand-daughter and the heir to his vocation as a historian, has written that he discovered a Byzantine-Turkish-Mongol unity and continuity flowing like an underground stream, the ancient, uninterrupted “Carpatho-Balkan community” stemming from the immemorial Thracian basis and followed by the multi-national Greek element which was so important, especially on the commercial level, in the history of the Danubian principates.
This melting-pot of races and cultures is a primordial medium of our history, a Nilotic slime in which there pullulate germs still confused and indistinct. If the Cimmerians, hard pressed in the eighth century B.C. by the Scythians, also – as suggested by Nestor – belong to the Thracians, and if the desert of the Getae (so called by Herodotus and Strabo) stretched so far as almost to merge with the ancient kingdom of the Odrisi which was lord of the Danube delta, then following the river to its mouth also means entering into a Cimmerian mist of origins, losing oneself in an ending that is really more of a return to the beginning.
Pompeius Trogus speaks of a “Histrianorum rex”, King of the Getae and at war with the Scythians. At the time of Justinian, Dobrujia was called Scythia Minor – mere names for me until a short while ago. Fantasy words fill the mouth and awake an imprecise echo, as at school we used to say Trebizond without knowing whether or not it was the same as Trapezunte; we knew that Mithridates was King of Pontus and Prusias of Bithynia, but were unclear as to exactly where to find Pontus or Bithynia on the map; and we loved to say “Cilicia” or “Cappadocia” as I still love to roll high-sounding names over my tongue. But if in the learned writings of my fellow-townsman Pietro Kandler I read that in even earlier times Dobrudia-Scythia Minor was called Istria, then it becomes a different matter: the name takes on a colour and a smell, and is the red soil and white rock overlooking my sea.
Are the Istrians therefore Thracians, as Apollodorus thought, or Colchians, according to the views of Pliny and Strabo; or are they Gepids? Does the quest for the Golden Fleece lead therefore home, to the beach chosen on high to make me understand that one can be immortal, and have the Fleece and the amphora emerged from my sea? This is a joke played by the Danube, and the muddle arises from the mistake made by the ancients, who thought that the Danube – the Ister – split into two branches, one of which flowed into the Black Sea and the other, the Quietus or Timavus, into the Adriatic. Thus Istria was the land of Euxine Pontus, but also the white peninsula in the Adriatic.
Perhaps it was the Thracians who came from the Black Sea who brought with them rumours of the Danubian lands, or maybe the gold of these names was brought by the Colchians who followed the Argonauts as they rowed up the Danube, the Száva and the Ljubljana, and then carried their ships on their shoulders. There is an Absyrtis in the Black Sea which, like the Absyrtides of the Adriatic, originated in the scattered limbs of Absyrtis, the brother slain by Medea.
Scholars are very harsh with mythographers seduced by words: “Strabo and Pliny are inexcusable in stating that Absyrtis was murdered in the Absyrtides Islands which are in the gulf of Venice,” says La Martinière’s Dictionary. Is happiness therefore not ruled out wholly and absolutely, even if its promise glitters only in the errors of the ancient geographers? I am not, of course, thinking of lending them any credence, according to the manner of science, which periodically refutes the results attained and returns to long discarded hypotheses. Pomponius Mela, it is clear, cannot withstand the criticism made against him in this regard by Bernardo Benussi, published in 1872 in the Records of the “Imperial Ginnasio Superiore” of Capodistria when the author, though young, was (as the presentation put it) already “a regular teacher, librarian and head of the class”.
Origins, unattainable and always uncertain, mean little, and not even Iorga is able to discover the primary substratum of his civilization. As Curtius said, “History does not know the origins of any people,” because history does not exist: it is the historian who creates and produces it, by posing the question and then investigating it. Every genealogy goes back to the Big Bang. Discussions about the Latin origin of the Rumanians, or about the Dacio-Geto-Latino-Rumanian continuity, brought up time and time again by historians and by the nationalistic ideology of Rumania, are scarcely more important than the quarrel between Furtwangen and Donaueschingen over the sources of the Danube.