“Echoes of Eight Centuries”
June 20, 2015
219 meters above the Danube and Stift Durnstein, with the charming and elegant Hotel Richard Lionheart nestled below in the idyllic village with its peerless Baroque cathedral, and reachable only by way of a steep but well-maintained trail carved into the daunting rock face, stand the ruins of a castle that trigger a lifetime of fantasies of Crusades long past, clashing armies in medieval armor from impossible distances, the apocryphal tale of Blondel rescuing Richard the Lionheart, and the times of the ruthless robber barons along Europe’s most historic waterway. Remarkably and admirably, the site has not been defiled by easy access, half-hearted attempts at restoration, or lame commercialization, so instead the craggy ruins stand as they have for centuries in command of a sweeping 240-degree view of the swiftly flowing Danube, far below. Whatever your time constraints, build this experience of utter peace and waves of historic memories into your next trip to the Wachau stretch in Lower Austria. If one can sit atop the ruins as I did (at age 70 the climb was surely not too arduous) and not feel the excruciating but exhilarating weight of the passage of civilizations and eras and the ultimate triumph of immortal stone over mortal flesh, then I doubt the traveler has ever really embraced life. I climbed at 7 in the morning to make sure I was able to be alone at the pinnacle of the ruin at that first golden hour of the day, and after clambering up, overmatched camera in hand that could never capture the thrilling vistas of outcrops and stonework and distant vineyards and verdant hillsides at every turn, I thought of my dear mother and father who sat at that exact perch on the ruins in 1937 when Austria was teetering on the verge of Anschluss and all of Europe and much of humanity was poised on the knife edge of imminent armageddon. (They were paddling down the Danube in a Klepper foldboat for 900 miles that summer as a young married couple, an adventure in the shadow of Naziism that culminated in a book entitled “The Danube Flows Through Fascism.) If you appreciate a unique vantage point on the infinitude of time and the river, to borrow North Carolinian Thomas Wolfe’s title, I cannot recommend anyplace on earth that is as powerful for all the senses as Durnstein’s timeless majesty on a June day, midstream in the inexorable current of days without end. Each of us will hear our own haunted melodies of echoed memory as the wind whistles through the long-abandoned parapets, high above the visual symphony of the Wachau.