'Progress' closing in on watery haunt of ibis and old believers

Letter from the Danube delta: The history of this road is as serpentine as its route, through the rolling cornfields and flower-strewn valleys of southeast Romania.

A drive of a few dozen miles offers a short course in the region's past, beginning at the village of Nicolae Balcescu, ending at one called Mihail Kogalniceanu, and passing through little Slava Chercheza, Slava Rusa and Babadag en route.

Balcescu and Kogalniceanu were heroes of Romania's 19th-century fight for independence from the Habsburgs, Ottomans and Russians.

Dusty Babadag is home to the country's oldest mosque, and was settled in 1262 by the Ottomans' predecessors, the Seljuk Turks.

In these remote and tranquil villages, sallow-skinned Romanians are outnumbered by craggy men with tangled beards and fair, round-faced women, who gather in the shade of tidy, pale blue cottages built like the ones their forebears left behind further east.

The names of these places betray the provenance of their people: "Slava" means glory, and has a Slavic root; "Chercheza" means Cossack and "Rusa" - Russian.

Their founders fled to this remote corner of Europe, where the River Danube blends with the Black Sea, to escape Tsarist persecution after the Great Schism bitterly divided the Orthodox church in the 17th century.

The "old believers" who refused to abandon their rites were excommunicated and purged. Tens of thousands were murdered, while others committed mass suicide, certain that the Apocalypse was nigh and Tsar Peter the Great was the Antichrist.

Other so-called raskolniki - a word derived from the Russian for "schism", which gave Dostoevsky the name for his hero in Crime and Punishment - fled to Siberia and the Russian Far East. Fear drove some even further, to Alaska and Canada.

Another group, consisting of Cossack fishermen from modern-day Ukraine, fled southwest after the Tsar's men crushed an uprising led by one of their chiefs, Nekrasov.

The village of Old Nekrasovka still stands in Romania today, its remoteness and obscurity hardly diminished by the centuries.

It is deep inside one of Europe's last great wildernesses, a wetland twice the size of Luxembourg and teeming with life, where the raskolniki found a place to hide from the tsar and fished as they had at home on the mighty Don and Dnipr rivers to the northeast.

The old believers still speak Russian and Ukrainian, and worship before cherished icons in the cool dark of their blue-walled churches.

They also adhere to the Julian calendar, which most of western Europe abandoned more than 200 years ago.

Their villages cluster on the silt banks that rise among the reeds and semi-submerged forests of the delta - where they survive on little more than the fish that they catch from among the 100 or so species which thrive in its rich, murky waters.

But the raskolniki are not totally removed from modern life. As they repair their nets and clean their catch by the water, more and more boats carry tourists past their villages.

When this happens they offer a bed and a bowl of thick fish soup to an increasing number of inquisitive foreigners, in return for a little much-needed cash.

In Tulcea, a busy port at the delta's edge, travel firms and touts offer trips through the Unesco biosphere reserve in luxury launches and speedboats, and promise a glimpse of the 300 bird species living here or that pass by on migration.

Tulcea clangs and wails with the arrival of tankers and barges from around the Black Sea. They come from Ukraine, Turkey, Russia and Bulgaria.

But only a few minutes away, their wake subsides in the creeks and lagoons of the delta, where wild swans, cormorants and egrets thrive.

Elusive pelicans, eagles, herons, ibis, spoonbills, bee-eaters and kingfishers glide and flit through the backwaters.

It is here that the Danube finally exhales after its 3,000km meander from Germany, dumping 50 million tonnes of silt a year into the Black Sea and inching the delta marshlands ever further into open water.

Few changes along this coast are so hard to perceive.

Beach resorts further south are growing quickly to cater for a booming tourist industry centred on Constanta - site of a Greek and then Roman settlement to which the poet Ovid was banished for offending the Roman Emperor Augustus. The creator of Metamorphoses died in exile there in about AD 17.

Closer to the delta, in the old Muslim stronghold of Babadag, the rumble of modernity can be heard fast approaching .

More than 1,000 US soldiers will spend much of the next month playing war games with Romanian troops on a nearby firing range.

That may only be a taste of changes to come.

Romania has offered to host US troops permanently in this region, where the European landmass drops away towards the Middle East.

Soon, it seems, American jets will erupt from the Mikhail Kogalniceanu airbase and soar over the Ottoman minaret of Babadag and the Danube Delta, where old believers will watch the vapour trails as they cast their nets into the quiet water.