Free The Danube by Nick Thorpe

daughter of the King of Dobrogea from a dragon and cut off its seven heads with his wooden Bektashi sword. 3 A peculiar variant of the story suggests that a Christian monk claimed credit for this feat, in order to win the hand in marriage of the King's daughter – the prize announced by her father for anyone who could rid him of the dragon. Sari Saltuq proposed to the monk an ordeal by fire, to find out which of them was telling the truth about the defeat of the dragon. They were both boiled alive in the same cauldron, suspended over the flames. The monk perished in agony, while Sari Saltuq emerged unscathed. In other legends he is paired with Saint Nicholas, the patron saint of children.
    At Blagaj in Bosnia, where the River Buna – ‘the good’ – flows fully formed out of a cliff face, a handsome dervish lodge clings to the cliff ledge beside it. Ancient stone steps lead down straight into the crystal clear water, where the dervishes used to come to wash before prayers. Up in the lodge the rooms hum with silence and devotion. Off one room is a domed stone roof, with star-shaped holes cut into it through which the rain can fall: an Islamic shower room. In a small shrine at the side of the building is one of the tombs of Sari Saltuq, royally clad in green and gold, with his rounded dervish hat at the raised end. During the 1992–95 war, Muslim refugees took shelter here, and the Croats who shelled Blagaj tried and failed to drop mortars on the roof. Each night Zijo, the self-appointed caretaker of the place, would put cups of water out beside the raised coffins. Each morning he would find the cups empty. 4 There is another, sadder story told aboutBlagaj. Close to where the Buna emerges from the cliff are two restaurants, famous for their excellent trout, freshly caught from the river. The cliff above was once home to eagles. Just before the war, in the winter of 1991, the restaurant owner believed the eagles were stealing his hens, and put out the poisoned carcass of a sheep for them to eat. The eagles died. According to local legend, war would engulf Bosnia if the eagles ever disappear from Blagaj. The conflict began the following April. Another tomb of Sari Saltuq, at Krujë in Albania, resides high in the mountains looking down on to the Adriatic. Another small domed turbe , arched with thin, wafer-like bricks. Another fine, slanted coffin, dressed in green and gold cloth, mounted with a dervish mitre. Outside you can rest in the shade of tall mulberry trees and enjoy the sweet scent of fig trees baking in hot sunshine. Vines, honeysuckle and pomegranates grow from the cracks in the walls. 5
    Thin, tentative threads tie distant Albania and Bosnia to the Danube. The Drina river turns its back on the White and Black Drin rivers and the Neretva, which all flow westwards to the Adriatic. The Drina flows north and east into the Morava, which meets the Danube before Belgrade. Sari Saltuq has seven tombs in all and is said to have been buried in each of them, so no one knows where his body really lies. ‘Through tolerance and piety … Sari Saltuq influenced the non-Muslims and contributed a great deal to the spreading of the Islamic religion in the Balkans. He won the non-Muslims’ affection, maintaining open lines of communication with them, and thus for centuries Muslims and non-Muslims have been living in peace and harmony in Dobrogea,’ reads the information booklet, available at the mosque. The mosque itself has another tomb, just behind the main building, of Gazi Ali Pasha, who was the governor of Buda in the early seventeenth century.

    The snowdrops of Babadag, Memnune tells me sternly, have the most beautiful scent. ‘But what do they actually smell of?’ I ask her, casting aside a lifetime of certainty that while snowdrops may have many other qualities, they are certainly odourless. ‘Freshly laundered linen on a winter's day,’ she says, confidently.
    Memnune serves cups of strong black Turkish coffee as