At Harta, a little further along our route, the mayor invites us to visit one of the village’s old houses and shows us Roman artefacts from the time when the Danube formed the border of the Empire. Harta was founded by Germans in the 18th-century, when the embankments were built along the river. The mayor explains the history behind his constituents’ mixture of Austrian, Hungarian and French family names and behind the vast European melting pot the region became.