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When King Carol II of Romania set foot on the tiny Danubian island of Ada Kaleh on 4 May 1931, it was said among the islanders that his arrival had been foretold in a dream The decisions he made after spending two hours there that summer evening were so momentous that his visit would later be marked with an annual festival   About a year into his reign, the king was touring the area and had decided to drop in on this most unusual corner of his realm The island lay in the region known as the Iron Gates, where the river passes through a series of gorges as it descends through the Carpathian Mountains It was a perilous place for river traffic, and boats travelling upstream had to be towed from the bank in order to overcome the current Just above the first set of rapids, on a bend in the river opposite the town of Orşova, stood Ada Kaleh The island was little more than a narrow strip of sandy soil about a mile long and 400 metres wide at its broadest The people on the river’s northern bank were Romanian and to the south Serbian, but the islanders themselves – who numbered about 680 at the time of the king’s visit – were Turks Framed against the dark flanks of the mountains that rose on each side of the Danube, Ada Kaleh’s poplars and chestnuts, the cypresses of its cemetery and the minaret of its mosque, seemed to float like a mirage on the water’s surface   The king – white military uniform dazzling in the sunshine – stepped from his boat at around five o’clock trailed by an entourage of more soberly clad bureaucrats, soldiers, and politicians At that time, the island’s flowers were in bloom, tumbling over the ramparts of the old fortress from which it took its name (ada kale meaning ‘island castle’ in Turkish) and bursting from the whitewashed petrol tins that stood in its cobbled streets The crumbling battlements glowed in the warm, sharp light of the late afternoon sun that broke through the scattered clouds,