Free The Danube by Nick Thorpe Page A

we sit in her neat, middle-class living room discussing Sari Saltuq. I asked in the street of the town who could tell me about the saint and was directed straighthere. She is a matronly woman, with intelligent brown eyes and a passion for flowers and history. Sari Saltuq's grave disappeared for a while, she tells me, only to be rediscovered by a man called Koyun Baba, while walking with his sheep. Koyun means ‘sheep’ in Turkish. Babadag was once threatened by a huge flood, pouring from a hole in the ground, but Koyun Baba saved the community by pushing barrow-loads of cotton into the hole. The British orientalist F. W. Hasluck mentions another Bektashi saint, Pambuk Baba, ‘who seems to have succeeded, or to be identical with the Bektashi saint Koyun Baba’. 6 Pambuk means ‘cotton’ in Turkish. Both men were disciples, like Sari Saltuq, of Hajji Bektash, the founder of the Bektashi order of dervishes, the mystical order most closely associated with the janissaries, the elite of the Ottoman armies. There are still Bektashi strongholds in Albania and Macedonia. Miskin Baba, from the island of Ada Kaleh in the Danube, and Gül Baba, still honoured upstream in Budapest, were also Bektashis. The Danube carried the Islamic faith upriver into Europe. The track up the mountain is steep and well worn, through young woods of oak and acacia, sprouting out of a carpet of bluebells. As the path levels at the top of the hill, the bushes are tied with strips of coloured rags, like man-made blossom impatient for spring. Koyun Baba's grave is rather humble, with a crescent moon at its head, set in crude granite. He didn't actually want a grave at all – unlike Sari Saltuq – and each time the villagers made one for him, the story goes, he scattered the rocks, which came to resemble sheep on the meadows around the mountain. On his latest grave, not yet self-vandalised, stands a single candle. The rags on the bushes were tied by Muslim Gypsies, Memnune told me, who make pilgrimages and picnics here every year on 6 May, Saint George's Day according to the Gregorian calendar. A single robin hops curiously from branch to branch, watching me closely. A battered tin sign admonishes visitors, in Romanian and Turkish, that it is a sin to ask for anything from the dead, a warning defied by every strip of rag tied to the branches. From far below this pudding-shaped hill come the barking of dogs and the shouts of men engaged in some sporting activity. Rain starts to fall lightly on Koyun Baba's grave. Before leaving, I pick a small handful of snowdrops. Delicate, but fully scented, just like fresh linen sheets, plucked, stiff to the touch, from a washing line on a cold winter's day.
    When we meet again Memnune is so pleased to hear that I have taken the trouble to visit Koyun Baba, she tells me her dream. Some years earlier, on the night before the Muslim feast of Bayram, she dreamt that she should sacrifice a white ram on the right side of the courtyard of the mosque in Babadag. Muslims do sacrifice rams during Bayram, but this would normally be done in one's own yard. The strangest feature of her dream was that the gardens and yard of the mosque were laid out in a different pattern to how they really were at the time. She obeyed the dream and, with her brother-in-law's help, found an animal and sacrificed it in the place she had been told. Some time later, with funds from Turkey, the land around the mosque was re-landscaped and now corresponds exactly to the way she saw it in her dream. Across eastern Europe, the former empires quietly nurse what is left of their heritage, the Turks their mosques, the Russians their war memorials.
    Memnune calls a friend to take me to Sari Saltuq's tomb. It is a simple, handsome affair, with the traditional green-draped coffin in the centre of the room and an arched, beehive-shaped roof made of thin, white-washed bricks. The brickwork is like the roof of the Bajrakli mosque in Belgrade. The floor is paved