Deeper Than the Danube

Irena Ashcraft

by Irena Ashcraft

Story
Danube River

We sit in a modern white room with a single projector, watching a story unfold from 1965. A team from the University of Belgrade is excavating an archeological site on the Danube, in Eastern Serbia. They are racing to uncover what lies below the surface before the soon-to-be-built Iron Gate I hydroelectric power station sends the Danube’s waters surging more than 35 meters, erasing it all.

For months, they dig, and smoke cigarettes, and flirt. As I watch the film, the sweaters, coats, and hairstyles transport me to an era where fabrics were thicker and colors all seemed to be variations of browns, olives, golds, and creams. Someone lights a cigarette. Someone writes a report on a typewriter. They all ignore the camera.

They dig, and slowly the earth yields up earthenware fragments, figurines of domestic animals, and a sacrificial vase. These, they expected. A Neolithic civilization had already been documented in this region. But what if…?

I’m watching the lead archeologist, Dragoslav Srejović, survey the site when the film’s narrator says something that catches my heart.

“Listening to his own intuition, Srejović decided to dig deeper…”

Here, in a flicker of a moment, science momentarily bows to mystery, and one of the greatest discoveries about who we are, and where we come from, begins to unfold.

Listening to his intuition, his intuition, his intuition…the team digs, and the earth offers up gray sand. Then some charred wood. Then a stag’s antler, carved by human hands. They dig deeper. Now there are traces of a hearth. Then a stone figurine. A decorative pin. Hint after hint of a distant culture.

Deeper still. Now they reach an entire settlement of houses, streets, and a main square. And then: a skeleton of a man whose story reaches more than 8,000 years into the past. An entire society thrived here, thousands of years before we dared to expect, thousands of years before any other known European settlement.

Listening to his intuition, his intuition, his intuition… These words echo in my head as I sit in a room at the Lepenski Vir archeological site, just upstream from the Danube’s dramatic Iron Gates region. Today, this soaring glass-roofed complex contains the treasures recovered and relocated uphill from that original settlement, decades after the dam was built and the Danube swallowed the last of its mysteries.

Lepenski Vir has been called the first city in Europe, the earliest evidence we have of a planned and permanent paleolithic settlement. Dating between 9500-7200 B.C., it far predates the Greek and Roman civilizations, as well as that of the Egyptians. We know these civilizations through archeology, legend and myth. But Lepenski Vir? It is the oldest known urban settlement in Europe, and we just nearly missed it.

How many more layers of history have been lost to the Danube’s flowing waters? My intuition tells me we have deeper still to go.

© Irena Ashcraft 2023-11-01

Genres
Novels & Stories
Moods
Adventurous, Informative
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