Floods

After last week’s storms, when biking along the Danube from Budapest to Nagymaros in the north, the river lays tight between the two banks like a vessel filled to the brim, which lacks just a little bit to overflow the rim. And in some tracks it does not even lack that little. Not long before Vác the cycle path continues in the Danube.



While looking at the water and thinking about an alternative route, it comes to my mind to publish here the photos of the great flood of 1908 in Moscow which I have been long gathering, and they are just waiting for an occasion. Not as if the two floods could be compare in size, God forbid.


The Danube even at the time of the great flood of 1838 covered Pest “only” at a height of 2.6, while on 11 April 1908 the Moskva river and its tributaries rose 9,3 meters in heigt, overflowing one fifth of the city. Two hundred thousand people lost their homes, and the number of those killed has never been published.


The only positive benefit of the flood was that a the photographers of Moscow wandered all over the city, and made such an extensive state survey of the most common streets, houses and yards of Moscow, which has never been done before or later until the revolution. And, as it is shown below, the photos were also converted in a great number into postcards intended for catastrophe tourists.


This picture seems to have realized the ideal photo outlined a century later by Sergei Maximishin. The people stucked on the roof order themselves into the poses of the traditional group photo. Someone has even brought up a Thonet chair to comfortably watch the events. Apparently this was a standard accessory in the disasters of Moscow.