"Brigach and Breg bring the Danube along"
Geography:
Source rivers: Breg: 48 km long, catchment area: 291 km2
Brigach: 43 km long, catchment area: 195 km2
Source: At the 1078 m high Martinskapelle (Furtwangen), 100 m from the Rhine/Danube watershed;
Start of the Danube: At the confluence of the Breg and Brigach rivers in the Donaueschingen district
Length: 2888.77 km, mouth into the Black Sea
Catchment area approx. 817,000 km²
The Danube is the only major European river that flows across the continent from west to east. After the Volga (3570 km), it is the longest river in Europe (2888 km) with the second largest catchment area.
The tributaries that contribute the most to the Danube's water volume at the mouth are:
The Iller, which has an average of 30 per cent more water at the mouth than the Danube itself at this point
The Inn, which contributes 10 per cent more water than the Danube
The Lech, which carries an average of 60 per cent of the Danube's water at its mouth
The Isar with 45 per cent of the Danube's water volume
The Drau with 40 per cent of the water volume
The Sava, which contributes 35 per cent of the water volume and is also the tributary with the most water
Naming
The Romanian name of the Danube is Dunărea, in Bulgarian, Serbian and Croatian it is called Dunav, in Hungarian Duna, Slovakian Dunaj and in English and French Danube. All of these names derive from the Latin Danubius, the name of a Roman river god. The ending au comes from the Germanic ouwe (floodplain, river).
In addition, the name Hister in Latin, Ister from the Greek Ístros, a river name that is usually traced back to the Celtic words ys (swift, rapid) and ura (water, river), was also used for the lower Danube. According to another interpretation, however, ys stands for high and low at the same time and thus denotes the vertical.
The history
In the seventh century BC, the Greeks sailed upriver from the Black Sea via the city of Tomis, now Constanţa. Their voyage of exploration ended at the Iron Gate, a rocky stretch of cataracts full of shallows whose dangerous course made it impossible for the Greek ships to continue their journey.
Under the Romans, the Danube formed the border with the pagan peoples to the north almost from its source to its mouth and was also a route for transporting troops and supplying the settlements downstream. From 37 until the reign of Emperor Valentinian I (364-375), the Danube Limes was the north-eastern border of the empire, with occasional interruptions, such as the fall of the Danube Limes in 259. The Imperium Romanum only succeeded in crossing the Danube into Dacia in two battles in 102 and 106 after the construction of a bridge in 101 near the garrison town of Drobeta at the Iron Gate. This victory over the Dacians under Decebalus gave rise to the province of Dacia, which was lost again in 271.
In the ninth century, the Danube was a migration route for the Asian pastoral people of the Magyars, who travelled up the Danube via the stopover of the Khazar Empire to what is now Hungary, where they founded the present-day Hungarian nation together with the indigenous Slavic population under Stephen I over the next 150 to 200 years.
The legendary migration of the Niblungs along the Danube from Burgundy to King Attila's Etzelsburg castle also dates back to the Middle Ages.
The Charlemagne route, which was used by Gottfried von Bouillon's army during the first crusade between 1096 and 1099, also travelled along the Danube from Regensburg to Belgrade. Around 340 years later, the direction was reversed, as the Danube was the central route for the Turkish army to transport troops and supplies on their campaign through south-east Europe. The river enabled them to advance quickly, and in 1440 they fought the first battles for Belgrade 2,000 kilometres beyond the mouth of the river. However, the Ottoman army did not succeed in conquering Belgrade until 1521, but only a few years later, in 1526, it crushed the Hungarian kingdom in the first battle of Mohács (1526). As King Louis II died in the process, Hungary fell to Habsburg Austria, and this moment is regarded as the seed of the Danube Monarchy.
In 1529, the Turks reached Vienna, the centre of Central Europe, but were defeated there. This halted the Ottomans' expansion along the Danube and from the Battle of Mohács (1687) they gradually lost land and power again. The gradual push-back of the Turks was essentially due to the initiative of Austria-Hungary, which grew stronger as a result, especially as it was simultaneously ousted from the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. Alongside the Austrians, however, the Ottoman Empire was to remain the most important political factor in south-east Europe until the final loss of its Balkan territories as a result of the Russo-Turkish Wars (1768-1774) and the Balkan Wars of 1912/13. The Danube was not only the main military and commercial artery, but also the political, cultural and religious border between the Orient and the Occident.
After the Second World War, a new regulation was initiated in 1946 to replace the Paris Agreement of 1921. All neighbouring states were admitted to the Belgrade Conference, which was held in 1948, with the exception of the warring states of Germany and Austria. When the finalised agreement was signed, an annex was also signed, which subsequently admitted Austria to the Danube Commission. The Federal Republic of Germany was only able to join the Convention and the Danube Commission in March 1998, almost 50 years after the Belgrade Conference, as a result of Soviet reservations against German co-determination.
Geology
Although the upper reaches of the Danube are relatively smaller today, the Danube is geologically much older than the Rhine, with which its catchment area in today's southern Germany competes. This leads to some special features.
The Rhine is the only river in the Alps that flows northwards towards the North Sea. In doing so, it absorbs the water flowing northwards from the European watershed. Today, this divides parts of southern Germany like an invisible line.
Even before the last ice age, however, in the Pleistocene, the Rhine only began at the south-western tip of the Black Forest. The water from the Alps, which today flows into the Rhine, was then carried eastwards in the "Urdonau", which flowed further north in the valley of today's Altmühl and the Wellheimer Trockental along the line Wellheim-Dollnstein-Eichstätt-Beilngries-Riedenburg until the Riss Ice Age. The (now waterless) gorges in the present-day landscape of the Swabian Alb are parts of the bed of this former river, which was considerably larger than today's Danube. After the Upper Rhine depression had been eroded, so to speak, most of the Alpine water changed direction and today feeds the Rhine.
To this day, parts of the Danube water flow through the porous limestone of the Swabian Alb into the lower Rhine. As this large amount of subterranean water also eats more and more into the surrounding limestone, it is assumed that the upper Danube will one day disappear completely in favour of the Rhine.
Danube seepage occurs in the course of the river near Immendingen. Here, a large proportion of the Danube water seeps into the ground and reaches the Aachtopf, over 14 kilometres away, via underground caves in the karst rock, from where the water flows into Lake Constance and later into the Rhine. When there is very little water, it can also seep away completely at times; the Danube is then only fed by the Krähenbach and Elta rivers. As this drying up of the river has increased rapidly in recent decades, some of the Danube water is channelled past the seepage point through a tunnel. The tunnel and the associated weir are located behind the outskirts of Immendingen, while the tunnel itself leads to Möhringen.
Until shortly after Vienna, the river has more of a mountain river character, only then does it gradually turn into a lowland river. Factors such as melting snow and heavy rainfall in the Alpine region favour the rapid swelling of the river and the development of floods. The increasing regulation of the river and the partial destruction of floodplains further intensified this effect and the extent of the floods increased in the 20th century. The highest levels in the last hundred years were the floods of 1954, 1988 and 2002.
Danube economic area
Drinking water
The Danube is an important source of drinking water for around 10 million people along its course. In Baden-Württemberg, the Zweckverband Wasserversorgung supplies the entire area between Stuttgart, Bad Mergentheim, Aalen and the Alb-Donau district with drinking water, of which a good 30 per cent (2004: 30 million cubic metres) is treated Danube water. Cities such as Ulm and Passau also use Danube water as drinking water for the most part.
Austria, on the other hand, obtains 99 per cent of its drinking water from groundwater and spring water; only very rarely, for example during hot spells in Vienna, is water taken from the Danube to produce drinking water. The same applies in Hungary, which uses 91 per cent groundwater. The other countries along the middle course of the Danube also refrain from using Danube water as drinking water due to the high levels of pollution. Only places on the Danube in Romania, where the river is cleaner again, are still largely supplied with water from the Danube (Turnu-Severin, Danube Delta).
Hydropower
Five countries bordering the Danube obtain a significant proportion of their energy from hydropower plants on the Danube, namely Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Serbia and Romania. Other states either lack the partial territorial control over the Danube for autonomous construction (Croatia, Bulgaria and Moldova each have only one bank of the river), hydroelectric power plant construction is not politically feasible, as in Hungary, or the course of the Danube simply does not lend itself to such use, as in Ukraine.
In Germany, the first hydroelectric power stations were built as early as the end of the 19th century, particularly in the Upper Danube region, but also near Ulm, for example. However, the Danube never achieved the same importance as an energy supplier as further downstream, as it is comparatively weak and low in energy.
In Austria, on the other hand, the situation is already completely different, even though the first construction of a Danube power plant began relatively late, in 1953 at Ybbs-Persenbeug. Today, Austria has the highest proportion of hydropower in Europe after Iceland and Norway, and is also a leader in the Danube region, with around 25 per cent of public energy requirements being covered by Danube power plants. However, this development is not seen as entirely positive: the pure hydropower monoculture, which is concentrated in Austria particularly on the Danube, which is lined with run-of-river power plants from the German border to Vienna, changes the course and flow velocity of the water and impairs the regular flooding of the ecologically valuable riparian forests. In addition, the barrages form barriers for fish and other creatures that can no longer move freely in the river.
In Slovakia, hydropower is the second most important source of energy after lignite, accounting for a good 16 per cent of the energy mix. The largest share of this, namely 11 per cent of total electricity production, comes from the Gabčíkovo-Nagymaros hydropower plant, which was originally planned in cooperation with Hungary, but Hungary later withdrew from its construction and it was then completed by Slovakia alone.
The largest hydropower plant in Europe to date at the Iron Gate was jointly commissioned by Yugoslavia (now Serbia) and Romania in 1972 after eight years of construction. To this day, hydropower is one of the most important sources of energy in both countries, accounting for 37.1 per cent (Serbia) and 27.6 per cent (Romania).
Navigation
The Danube can only be navigated by inland waterway from Kelheim, almost 500 kilometres from its source, over a total distance of 2415 kilometres to its mouth. The Main-Danube Canal near Regensburg also provides a continuous waterway from the North Sea to the Black Sea.
From the point of view of Danube navigation, the Danube is divided into three sections:
* Upper Danube from Kelheim to Komárom/Komárno
* Middle Danube from Komarom/Komarno to Turnu Severin
* Lower Danube from Turnu Severin to the estuary
The Danube is one of the oldest and most important European trade routes. Even in prehistoric times, it served as a transport route for goods such as furs, which were usually transported along the river on simple rafts. In the Middle Ages, boats that had reached their destination harbour after the long and then still very dangerous journey were often dismantled and sold as firewood to avoid the arduous and slow return journey.
Over the millennia, boats could only travel upstream by towage. The boats were pulled upstream by people or draught animals, and later also by locomotives. This ended in 1812, when the first Danube steamboat was put into operation in Vienna. This made the ships faster, but the journey from Vienna to Linz by ship alone still took two to three weeks. A short time later, in 1829, the first Danube steamboat company was founded. The middle to end of the 19th century also saw the heyday of chain ships, which "pulled" themselves up the river using steam engine power on a chain that had previously been firmly laid in the river channel. Such chains were first laid for the Vienna-Pressburg route, but in 1891 they were also installed near Regensburg.
Originally, the Danube was an open commercial river, usable by everyone. This right was codified for the first time in the Treaty of Paris in 1836. 120 years later, on 18 August 1948, this right was codified again at the Belgrade Conference in the "Convention on the Regulation of Navigation on the Danube"; ships of all flags are permitted to navigate the Danube; only warships flying foreign flags are prohibited from navigating the Danube.
Fishing
The importance of fishing, from which the entire population in some places lived in the Middle Ages, declined sharply in the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. In Germany, only one Danube fisherman is still active between Straubing and Vilshofen. In Austria, on the other hand, there is still a modest amount of fishing around Linz and Vienna, but fishing is still more important in the Danube delta.
Viticulture
The Danube is also a wine-growing region in two (strictly speaking three) countries. The highest quality is the Wachau in Austria, one of the best Central European wine-growing regions, where mainly Grüner Veltliner, Riesling and Chardonnay are cultivated.
In Hungary, wine is cultivated almost everywhere along the Danube between Visegrád and the country's southern border; the capital of Hungarian wine was Vác. During the socialist era, the formerly famous Hungarian wines lost much of their quality, but since the 1990s, Hungarian viticulture has been experiencing a renaissance.
The third wine-growing region mentioned is located in Germany near Bach a.d.Donau between Regensburg and Straubing and is an economically insignificant curiosity, but at the same time a last relict of the originally lively culture of Baier wine on the German Danube dating back to the Romans.
Tourism
In addition to many famous and worthwhile individual destinations along the Danube, numerous Danube landscapes and national parks are of touristic importance, such as the Upper Danube Nature Park in Germany, the Wachau and the Danube Wetlands National Park in Austria, the Iron Gate in Romania and the transnational Danube Delta.
On the Upper Danube in particular, which is not navigable and therefore traffic-free, there are opportunities for canoeing, paddling and boat tours. In Germany and Austria, the Danube is also lined with long cycle paths that are ideal for cycling tours.
River cruise tourism is also important; in addition to the busy route from Vienna to Budapest, individual ships also sail from Passau to the Danube Delta and back. In the high season, over 70 cruise ships ply the river.
