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| 1612 Sulina - Waterfront in winter |
Posted on 27.05.2015, 05.11.2015
Located in Danube Delta, at the point where the Sulina branch of the Danube flows in the Black Sea, the town and free port Sulina is the easternmost point of Romania. It is not linked directly to the road network of Romania and can be reached only by water, either via the Danube or via the Black Sea. There is a theory according to which Sulina had been founded in 7th century BC by Cimmerians and developed together with the advent of the first Greek colonies on the shores of Pontus Euxinus.
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| 1613 Sulina - Hotel Camberi at the beginning of the 20th century (now, the hotel is a ruin) |
Anyway, during the mid-Byzantine period Sulina was a small cove and in 14th century a Genoese port inhabited by sailors, pirates and fishermen. In 18th century the Ottomans built a lighthouse there in order to accommodate communication between Istanbul and the Danubian Principalities, the main breadbaskets for the Ottoman capital. In 1800, Sulina have 8722 inhabitants and was a cosmopolitan settlement, being formed in equal measure from Romanians, Turks, Greeks, Armenians, Jews, Russians and Italians, reason why the writer Jean Bart called it "Europolis" in his most important novel.
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| 2010 Sulina - Waterfront |
Thanks to the Treaty of Adrianople, since 1829, that unfettered the Danube grain trade, Sulina, by then under Russian control, became important. Great sailing boats couldn't sail fully loaded to Brăila and Galaţi, which were the main export centres of Wallachia and Moldavia, because of the shallow waters of the river; therefore, they had to tranship at least part of their cargoes to smaller riverboats (shleps). The owners and crew of these sleps were almost always Greek.
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| 2011 Sulina - A view of the port |
Even greater development would occur after the Treaty of Paris (1856), which ended the Crimean War. One of the treaty’s terms determined the establishment of the Commissions of the Danube River, which has transformed the city from a fishing village into an important city for European river traffic. The real reason for establishing this commission was that none of the great powers did not want to leave the mouth of the Danube in the hands of one of them.
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