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The Iron Gates and the Lion of the Lord

The Iron Gates and the Lion of the Lord

Last updated on: October 17, 2026 at 2:32 pm by Dan Peterson

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The Iron Gates and the Lion of the Lord 2026-10-17T14:32:44-06:00 Dan Peterson

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An overall map of the River Danube. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image.) We’ve only cruised the stretch between Belgrade and an area adjacent to Bucharest. Thereby hangs a tale.

Yesterday, I didn’t finish my report about, well, yesterday. So I’ll take care of that right now:

Following lunch, we had another excellent lecture from Nadia Kizenko. Then, yesterday afternoon, we docked for the night at Donji Milanovac, Serbia. From there, we drove via bus up to a hilltop farm, from which we had an excellent view of the Danube River below and where most of the folks on our bus enjoyed a tiny shot glass of the local honey brandy. (Personally, I preferred the local apples, some month-old puppies, and, surprisingly, the fried thistle. But here’s an urgent clarification for my fans at the Peterson Obsession Board: I didn’t actually eat the puppies.)

Afterwards, we spent quite a bit of time at Lepenski Vir, a very important Mesolithic and Neolithic site. It’s not only very interesting but extremely well displayed and preserved.

My wife and I had a good and wide-ranging conversation over dinner with Professor Kizenko (and her sister, who is traveling with her on this trip in place of her husband) and two couples from San Diego whom we didn’t know.

A CIA map of Romania (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

It’s difficult, at this distance, to keep up with all of the lack of productivity at the essentially hibernating Interpreter Foundation. For example, I neglected to mention this item:

Parker Joseph Stone, “Nephi’s Ark Temple: Cosmic Kingship and the Sacred Voyage,” from ““For a Wise Purpose in Him”: Perspectives on the Small Plates of Nephi (1 Nephi–Words of Mormon): A Conference in Honor of President Jeffrey R. Holland”

This paper argues that Nephi’s rise to rulership in the Book of Mormon is not merely historical narrative, but a deeply structured theological drama that mirrors ancient patterns of cosmic kingship. Drawing on comparative ancient Near Eastern and Egyptian traditions, it situates Nephi’s acquisition of divine tools, his ascent to the mountain, the revealed construction of his ship, and his oceanic voyage within a broader ritual sequence by which kings moved from chaos to order, secured divine authority, and established legitimate rule. In this reading, the conflict with Laman and Lemuel is not incidental but essential—an expression of the archetypal struggle over divinely sanctioned kingship that underlies the entire Nephite narrative. Nephi’s account, therefore, functions not only as history but as a sustained defense and demonstration of his right to rule.

A partial view of the 83-mile-long Iron Gates gorge of the Danube River (Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph)

We spent a substantial portion of the day today cruising the Danube through the Iron Gates, the dramatic narrow gorge where the river cuts between the Carpathian and Balkan mountain ranges.

In the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece (as told by Apollonius of Rhodes in his third century BC Argonautica), the Argonauts, fleeing the Colchian fleet, sail their ship, the Argo, up the Ister — that is, up the Danube — through the Iron Gates. They then cross into central Europe/the Adriatic Sea and travel down through Italy (via the Po River or the Rhone) into the Mediterranean, passing Sicily, the Sirens, and Crete before they return to Iolcus.

The geography is actually quite impossible. Ancient Greek geographers and poets imagined that the Danube split into two branches — one flowing east into the Black Sea and another running westward toward the Adriatic Sea. Later Greek writers like Strabo and Diodorus Siculus pointed out that a navigable river branch connecting the Danube directly to the Adriatic doesn’t actually exist. Which is too bad. It’s a great story.

After we passed through the locks of the huge hydroelectric Iron Gate I and Iron Gate II dam system on the Danube, this afternoon, we had a lecture from Benjamin Sutherland of The Economist. It was entitled “The strategic challenges for Europe, the crucible in which Western liberal democracy was forged.”

A striking fact that Mr. Sutherland mentioned in passing: According to his best sources, Ukraine is killing roughly 800 to 1400 Russian soldiers per day. That is perfectly astonishing.

After lunch, I sat with him and with Professor Kizenko for a couple of hoursat her invitation. We had a fun and good-humored discussion. She has spoken at Brigham Young University at least once; I’ve actually seen her on the boat wearing a BYU athletic jacket. She had lots of questions about Arabic studies at BYU, the Islamic Translation Series, Islam itself, and so forth.

A Wikimedia Commons public domain photo by Yanko Malinov of an enormous modern rock sculpture of Decebalus (reigned AD 87–106), the last king of Dacia, who fought against the Roman emperors Domitian and Trajan. It overlooks the Danube from the Romanian side of the river at the Iron Gates.

Have you watched Episode 38 of Becoming Brigham yet? Have you subscribed to the series? There’s no reason not to subscribe. It’s free, after all.

I’ve been looking at recent letters to the editor about the new BYU School of Medicine. Some have half-seriously predicted, based on their jaundiced view of Brigham Young, that the new school will probably enroll no women and that it will certainly teach no courses on women’s health.

These folks apparently don’t know that, during a General Conference in 1873, Brigham Young and Eliza R. Snow, the general Relief Society president, issued a public call for women in the Utah Territory to train as physicians. They wanted the territory to be self-sufficient, and they sought to reduce high maternal and infant mortality rates and to allow Latter-day Saint women to preserve their modesty by receiving treatment from female doctors. Brigham helped to arrange travel, provided financial aid, and encouraged women to leave for eastern institutions, most notably for The Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania.

In 1877, Romania Pratt Penrose became the first Latter-day Saint woman to graduate from medical school. Ellis Reynolds Shipp also trained in Pennsylvania and returned to Utah Territory to practice and teach. Another very notable example was Martha “Mattie” Hughes Cannon, who became not only a physician but the first female state senator in the United States.

The arrival of such trained female physicians led directly to the 1882 opening of the Deseret Hospital in Salt Lake City.

I’ve also seen letters to the editor about BYUs football team. The University should be renamed, some of them contend, because Brigham was an evil man.

The need for Becoming Brigham is obvious and, I think, rather pressing. Please spread the word about it to anybody whom you think it might help or interest.

A Roman memorial plaque commemorating the completion of the Roman road along the Danube by the Emperor Trajan between AD 98 and AD 100. It sits on the Serbian side of the river, and was relocated a few decades ago when threatened by rising waters behind the iron Gates Dam.

Now I go to bed in blissful innocence of the outcome of the much-touted football game between BYU and Notre Dame. Some of our seventeen-member group of neighbors and friends intend to be up at 2:30 AM, our time here, to watch it. I do not.

Posted from Turnu Severin, Romania

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