When we were planning this Epic Journey, back in those heady days where every night we slept in the same bed as the night before, and the map was permanently spread out on the living room floor, Sid was really interested in seeing the traces of WW2 across this region. And it is very easy to see this – all the way down to here in Bulgaria there are war memorials, lists of dead sons of the village… some on the side of the “victors”, others not.
Back on the 6th of June – two weeks ago today – we listened to the radio reports of the commemoration of the D-day landings and the acknowledgement of all the human sacrifice that made them successful. But in parallel we have been going past memorial after memorial about war after war that has cut across this entirely indifferent Danube landscape. In the more northerly part of the journey it went back to WW1, since then we have seen a huge swathe of 1848 anti-feudal, anti-empire fights across Europe. We are following the track of the First Crusade, we are seeing the boundaries of the Roman Empire being created and defended, and then we saw some fabulous artifacts in Lepenski Vir which were created about 8,000 years ago… and probably that village was subject to some sort of warfare.
The country boundaries we are crossing feel so arbitrary. A tributary river, the edge of a wood, a small sign halfway along a dike.
It feels oddly unfair to single out the D-Day landing troops for special recognition.
I am feeling very philosophical. I had better stop writing now.
But I am going to make more effort to see non-war things. Let’s look at what our funny tribe of monkeys have created, rather than reasons and ways they have found to kill each other.
"Let's look at what our funny tribe of monkeys have created, rather than reasons and ways they have found to kill each other." <3