"Among the rivers that have a fame and are navigable up from the sea there is also the Ister" - wrote Herodot of Halicarnas in Histories (484-425 BC), the earliest description of the Lower Danube lands; Publius Ovidius Naso (cca AD 10-15) noticed, he too, that "... the Danube is the biggest, / By no means does it want ti be lower than the Nile". | 
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Europe's second largest river and the world's 26 th, with almost 2,900 km length, a basin of over 800,000 sq.km populated by some 80,000,000 inhabitants in eight countries - this is the business card of the generous waterway that has for millennia been the "thoroughfare" known, appreciated and travelled by the Phoenician long boats, Greek triremes, Roman galleys, Byzantine, genoese boats and caravels, Venetian galleons, Turkish bolozans, Cossask ships in the earlier days, tug boats, barges and motor boats nowdays. "Istros" in in the language of the Argonauts and in the mythology on the Nile banks, "Phisos" for the Phoenicians, "Danare" - "Donaris" for the Thraco-Getae, "Istrus" - "Histr" - "Danubius" for the Romans, known as "Rio Divino" at the court of Charles V and seen as "Le roi des fleuves de l'Europe" by Napoleon Bonaparte, the Danube traverses Romania's territory along its last 1,075 km, ending in a Delta - the most representative on the old continent and one of the most complex in the world.
"The Danube enters our country as if through a monumental triumphal arch through the Cazane Gorges, and leaaaves it throughh the hugem gorgeous, magnificent dovetail of the Delta" (Geo Bogza). It is an original place, unique of the kind: Europe's youngest land, neighbouring some of the planet's oldest mountains (Macin, a 400,000-year old Hercinian massif) - a motley of water and land, permanently struggling, permanently changing, a criss-cross of channels, bank ridges, creeks, rain forests, river and marine dunes, in an ample and permanent metamorphosis. No wander thet historical references differ: Herodotus believed that the Danube was merging with the sea though five arms, an account sustained by Eratostene from Alexandria and the Greek Polybiu (272-120 BC), but contradicted at the beginning of the first millennium AD by gepgrapher Stabo of Pont, who counted seven arms, by the Roman Pliny the Old, who was sure there were six of them, by the Egyptian Claudius Ptolemy (cca AD 90-168), who believed the Danube merged with the sea through seven arms, including "the Holy Mouth"; the Middle Ages maps are not of the same opinion either. According to some, the Danube ends now in the Sea of Marmara and then in the Dardanelles and, if it does take its water to the Black Sea, the maps show either one-two arms, or some five-six, and one lost even in the port of Constanta... It was late in 1856 that English captain Spratt drew a map closer to reality; meaning to his time's reality, since things are already different now; the lighthouses built on the sea shore in 1802 (Sulina) and 1865 (Sf. Gheorghe) stand now two-three km behind the sea line!
If we consider that at the point of the "delta" - a triangle similar to the Greek letter that lent its name to it - where the first branching of the arms occours, the river's average discharge is about 6,300 cu.m/second, we will understand the meaning of the fact that in two minutes there flows water enough to meet a day's consumption of a city over 1,000,000 inhabitants; the water carries some two tons of alluvia in suspension every second.
Short history
"There is an old citty by the Danube or Ister, / With strong walls: it is not easy to get in; / Aėgyssus built it and it is named Aėgyssus" - confirmed Publius Ovidius Naso.
The oldest known map that shows Dacia (Tabula Peutingeriana , 2nd-3rd centuries) places between Noviodunum (Isaccea) and Histria oonlu the town Ad Stoma, approximately on the site of the above-mentioned fortification. As there is no other evidence, we take for granted the word of the poet, generally well informed, and add that by "the Delta's gate" the Romans based their Lower Danube fleet.
That the roots of history run deep at Tulcea is proven by the traces of the Hallstatt settlements (11th-7th centuries BC) on the Dealul Taberei Hill. Lowered according to the Roman habit and closer to the access ways, the fortification was consolidated in the 2nd and 3rd centuries. It was eventually conquered and ruled by the Byzantines (8th-9th centuries), the Genoese (10th-13th centuries), the pre-feudal indigenous tribes ruled by Balica, by Dobrotici (hence the name of Dobrogea), and, starting in 1390, by Mircea the Old "... by the will of God mastering and ruling ... on the either side all over the Danube down to the big sea and master of the city of Darstor".
Starting from 1416 the Ottomans controlled Dobrogea. The locality became known as Hora-Tepe (the round dance of the seven hills, as the natives say, probably thinking of Rome) and the name Tulcea appears in 1595 in accounts by Pado Giorgici. It is mentioned by Evila Celebi (1650), Matteo Gondola (1674), by La Mottraye, who sees it in 1711 as "... a village placed on a high place and guarded by small fortification with seven towers." It was also called the Mill City - " On a coast hill, there appears a most pleasant sight: it is a host of mills, hurrying, all of them, a if vying to finish the job the soonest", according to Boucher de Perthes (Voyages į Constantinopole, Paris, 1853).
As early as 1848, the German Ungewiter mentioned "a small shipward for 300 t river boats". Tulcea found its present contours after the Independence war (1877-1878).
Most of today's Delta adventures start in Tulcea.
| Last update: 2003, May 28 | |||||||||
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