One of the goals of Russia’s Eastern policy was to turn Moldavia and Wallachia, the two Romanian principalities north of the Danube, from Ottoman vassals into a controllable buffer zone and a springboard for future military operations against Constantinople. Russia on the Danube describes the divergent interests and uneasy cooperation between the Russian officials and the Moldavian and Wallachian nobility in a key period between 1812 and 1834. Victor Taki’s meticulous examination of the plans and memoranda composed by Russian administrators and the Romanian elite underlines the crucial consequences of this encounter. The Moldavian and Wallachian nobility used the Russian-Ottoman rivalry in order to preserve and expand their traditional autonomy. The comprehensive institutional reforms born out of their interaction with the tsar’s officials consolidated territorial statehood on the lower Danube, providing the building blocks of a nation state. The main conclusion of the book is that although Russian policy was driven by self-interest, and despite the Russophobia among a great part of the Romanian intellectuals, this turbulent period significantly contributed to the emergence, several decades later, of modern Romania.
Opening with the ominous scene of one young school girl whispering an urgent account of Nazi horror to another over birthday cake, Ozsváth’s extraordinary and chilling memoir tells the story of her childhood in Hungary, living under the threat of the Holocaust. The setting is the summer of 1944 in Budapest during the time of the German occupation, when the Jews were confined to ghettos but not transported to Auschwitz in boxcars, as were the Hungarian Jewry living in the countryside. Provided with food and support by their former nanny, Erzsi, Ozsváth’s family stays in a ghetto house where a group of children play theater, tell stories to one another, invent games to pass time, and wait for liberation. In the fall of that year, however, things take a turn for the worse. Rounded up under horrific circumstances, and shot on the banks of the Danube by the thousands, the Jews of Budapest are threatened with immediate destruction. Ozsváth and her family survive because of Erzsi’s courage and humanity. Cheating the watching eyes of the munderers, she brings them food and runs with them from house to house under heavy bombardment in the streets. As a scholar, critic, and translator, Ozsváth has written extensively about Holocaust literature and the Holocaust in Hungary. Now, for the first time, she records her own history in this clear-eyed, moving account. When the Danube Ran Red combines an exceptional grounding in Hungarian history with the pathos of a survivor, and the eloquence of a poet to present a truly singular work.
Germany's invasion of Hungary in 1944 marked the end of a culture that had dominated Central Europe from the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. In this poignant memoir, Charles Farkas offers a testament to this vanished way of life—its society, morality, personal integrity, wealth, traditions, and chivalry—as well as an eyewitness account of its destruction, begun at the hands of the Nazis and then completed under the heel of Soviet Communism. Farkas's recollections of growing up in Budapest, a city whose grandeur embraced—indeed spanned—the Danube River; his vivid descriptions of everyday life in Hungary before, during, and after World War II; and his ultimate flight to freedom in the United States remind us that behind the larger historical events of the past century are the stories of the individual men and women who endured and, ultimately, survived them.
The history of the world’s second international organisation, an innovative techno-political institution established by Europe’s Concert of Powers to remove insecurity from the Lower Danube.
'Neither a travel book, nor a vast prose poem, nor a history, nor philosophy, nor voyage of discovery, but often all at once' Independent on Sunday WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY RICHARD FLANAGAN In this fascinating journey Claudio Magris, whose knowledge is encyclopaedic and whose curiosity limitless, guides his reader from the source of the Danube in the Bavarian hills through Austro-Hungary and the Balkans to the Black Sea. Along the way he raises the ghosts that inhabit the houses and monuments - from Ovid to Kafka and Canetti - and in so doing sets his finger on the pulse of Central Europe, the vital crucible of a culture that draws on influences of East and West, of Christendom and Islam.
The Roman conquests of Macedonia in the 2nd century BC led directly to the extension of their authority over the troublesome tribes of Thrace to the south of the Danube. But their new neighbor on the other side of the mighty river, the kingdom of the Dacians, was to pose an increasing threat to the Roman empire. Inevitably, this eventually provoked Roman attempts at invasion and conquest. It is a measure of Dacian prowess and resilience that several tough campaigns were required over more than a century before their kingdom was added to the Roman Empire. It was one of the Empire's last major acquisitions (and a short-lived one at that). Dr. Michael Schmitz traces Roman involvement in the Danube region from first contact with the Thracians after the Third Macedonian War in the 2nd century BC to the ultimate conquest of Dacia by Trajan in the early years of the 2nd Century AD. Like the other volumes in this series, this book gives a clear narrative of the course of these wars, explaining how the Roman war machine coped with formidable new foes and the challenges of unfamiliar terrain and climate. Specially commissioned color plates bring the main troop types vividly to life in meticulously researched detail.
The Danube River Basin is shared by 19 countries and there is no river basin in the world shared by so many nations. Europe’s second largest river basin with a total 2 area of about 800,000 km is also home to 83 million people of different cultures, languages and historical backgrounds. Management of common water sources and overcoming dif?culties caused by droughts and ?oods requires co-operation between the countries. In 1971 these c- mon interests stimulated the hydrologists of – at that time – eight Danube countries to begin regional co- operation in the framework of the International Hydrological Decade of UNESCO. The result of this research was The Hydrological Monograph of the Danube and its Catchment, which was published in 1986. Since 1975 this co-operation has continued under the umbrella of the International Hydrological Programme (IHP) of UNESCO. In the past 20 years political turbulence has caused an increase in the number of countries, making the co-operation dif?cult at times.
Over the last few decades, archaeologists and cultural scientists have come to a better understanding of the extent of Neolithic civilisation on the Balkan peninsula. This Danube Civilisation, thriving between the 6th and 4th millennia BCE, was using a writing system long before the Mesopotamians and is remarkable for its accomplishments in craftsmanship, art and urban development. In this book, Harald Haarmann provides the first comprehensive insight into this enigmatic Old European culture, which is still largely unknown to the greater public. He describes the trade routes, settlements, mythology and writing system of this people, traces the changes resulting from the arrival of the Indo-Europeans, and shows how this first advanced civilisation in Europe influenced its successors.