Ada Kaleh · near Orșova, Romania
Three kilometres downstream of Orșova there was an island with a fortress, a mosque, coffee houses and a few hundred people who spoke Turkish. Since 1971 it has lain under the reservoir of the Iron Gates dam. It is rebuilt here from old maps, in the gorge where it stood.
Scroll, and the Danube drops 25 metres to its 1966 level.
Today the reservoir here stands at up to 69.5 metres above sea level. In the 1960s the Danube ran through the gorge about 25 metres lower, at around 44 metres, and in the middle of it lay an island 1.4 kilometres long and at most 385 metres wide.
The half facing Orșova was a star-shaped fortress with four bastions, built by the Austrians between 1718 and 1738. The downstream half held orchards, gardens and the village houses.
This photograph was taken in 1949 from the Banat hills, looking south-west. Almost the whole island is in view: the trees, the roofs and, on the river, tugs pulling barges. The model is seen from roughly the same place.
There was no bridge. Boatmen rowed people from the Romanian bank to the landing stage on the island's north shore. Gheorghe Bob arrived as a child in the late 1940s:
“I get into the boat, I see that water so hu-u-uge, immense for the child I was… A bit afraid, but curious.”
Ahmet Engur, born on the island in 1941, rowed on Sundays. He remembers one day with 27 crossings.
Between the wars the island had privileges: sugar free of state taxes and the right to make cigarettes. Visitors left with sugar, coffee, tobacco and Turkish delight. A 1934 report noted that each visitor could take 15 kilograms of sugar and a thousand cigarettes off the island.
In the 1960s the excursion ships Oltenița and Carpați brought tourists, and island families sold Turkish delight, coffee and ice cream.
The streets ran under the vaults of the fortifications. The houses were low, whitewashed, with tiled roofs; some were built into the ramparts themselves, from the fortress's own bricks. In 1913 an Ottoman register counted 179 refugees living under the arches of the walls.
Durgut Husref, son of one of the island's coffee-house keepers, described how the coffee was made:
“We made it from green beans roasted right there on the spot. You had to know exactly how to make a finger-thick crema and how hot the water should be. It isn’t made with boiling water!”
Ana Vlad, a teacher on the island, remembered that for Turkish delight they “stirred for two hours without stopping at the cauldron where they’d put sugar and rose petals”.
The building went up around 1720 as the Franciscan church of the Austrian fortress, and became a mosque after 1739, when the island returned to the Ottomans. Early in the 20th century it was rebuilt with money from the sultan. On the island’s 1:5,000 plan, the building we identify as the mosque measures about 40 by 13 metres. The minaret, by our estimate from the architects’ survey drawings of 1964–1967, was about 35 metres tall.
“And when you went into their mosque, for days afterwards you carried the smell of myrrh that got into your clothes.”
Beyond the fortress lay the village: a lane running along the island, gardens, figs, mulberries, walnuts and roses. At the eastern tip stood a small triangular fort. The cemetery was next to the mosque. The island also held the tomb of Miskin Baba, a dervish who, the legend says, had come from Bukhara.
“Walking to the market you could smell tobacco. Walking to the water you could smell moss.”
The often-told story, that the great powers forgot the island at the Congress of Berlin in 1878, does not stand up in the documents. On 21 May 1878, three weeks before the Congress opened, Vienna and Constantinople agreed that Austro-Hungarian troops would occupy the island “provisionally”. The Treaty of Berlin said nothing about it, and the arrangement suited both empires.
For forty years Ada Kaleh stayed the sultan’s in law and Austria-Hungary’s in practice. Its people paid no taxes, had no customs and did no military service. In July 1919 the Paris Peace Conference gave it to Romania. The timeline, with sources.
The census of December 1930 found 455 people on the island, in 119 households: 418 Turks, 21 Romanians, and a few Hungarians, Germans and Armenians. In 1913 an Ottoman register counted 637, refugees included. The figure of a thousand inhabitants, often repeated, does not appear in any census.
“We are children of the water: the moment we opened our eyes, we saw water.”
After the split between Tito and Stalin the island became a frontier zone, and tourism stopped for years. In 1951 some of its people were deported to the Bărăgan plain.
“You weren’t allowed onto the island after 8 in the evening, and the communists had put a wattle fence along the road so you could see neither Yugoslavia nor Ada Kaleh.”
Pervin Halimoğlu remembers that bath water came from the Danube, and the border guard unlocked the padlock and then locked it again.
In 1964 Romania and Yugoslavia began the Iron Gates dam, about 8 kilometres downstream. Its reservoir would cover the island.
“One day we woke to find them taking measurements on the island. We sensed they wanted to move us. It was around ’64–’65. Later they told us the dam was being built.”
The first families left for Turkey in 1967. Most left in 1968: for Istanbul, Constanța, Bucharest, Orșova, Turnu Severin. The last families left in 1969 or 1970, depending on who tells it.
“It was such a commotion. Some asked for Turkey, others for Constanța, they scattered everywhere. Many old people died of grief then.”
“The real tragedy came only after leaving, when you realised you’d never go back.”
In 1968 the graves were dug up and taken to Șimian, an island 22 kilometres downstream, where part of Ada Kaleh was to be rebuilt.
“Everything was moved, bones and grave-stones and everything went to Simian, but no one knows who is who now.”
The minaret was blown up. Ahmet Engur had slipped back onto the island on an army boat to fetch more of his belongings, and saw the charges being laid; he watched the fall from the shore at Orșova:
“I watched them lay the explosives … The minaret fell to one side at first, at 45 degrees…”
Which way it fell is not recorded. The model tips it to the south.
The houses were emptied and pulled down. Some were blown up for “Asaltul” (“The Assault”), a film by the army’s studio. The walls and gates meant to be rebuilt on Șimian were numbered stone by stone. The Șimian project was never finished.
“I didn’t grasp it until I saw my house with its roof stripped. That we’d be moved. I hadn’t believed it.”
“All the vegetation was on the ground, the two 15-metre cypresses from the cemetery, the poplar grove…”
On 13 August 1969 the Danube was closed off at the dam. From then on, the water behind it began to rise.
The water
The first turbines started in August 1970. On 20 August Eberhard Nabel photographed the island from the Serbian shore: the houses were gone, and of the fortress only the brick faces of the bastions remained, a metre or two above the water.
The water probably closed over the walls between autumn 1970 and 1971. No dated level readings for those months were found. The heights in the model are reconstructed from the August 1970 photograph, the island’s height on the 1930 map and the history of the lock.
The power station was inaugurated on 16 May 1972. At first the reservoir was held at no more than 68 metres. The level was raised to 69.5 metres under a 1977 agreement, together with the second dam, Iron Gates II.
With the reservoir full, 20–25 metres of water stand over where the streets were, less the silt the river has laid down in half a century. At the lowest level allowed, 63 metres, the island still lies under about 15 metres of water. Stories of ruins surfacing when the water drops do not fit these heights.
“No, they just sit quietly. Or scatter flowers on the water.”
In December 2023 a sonar image of the reservoir bed circulated online, credited to the Serbian waterways authority. It appears to show the fortress walls on the western half of the island. Its author and the survey date could not be found, so it is mentioned here without being relied on.
On Șimian island, near Drobeta-Turnu Severin, a few walls and gates rebuilt from the numbered stones still stand, along with the moved cemetery. The mosque’s great carpet, a gift from the sultan, was taken to Constanța before the island was cleared.
“I was 18 when I left the island. My dreams are still from there; I don’t dream myself anywhere else.”
Pick a year, then turn the island with your mouse or finger. The wheel, a two-finger pinch or the + and − buttons zoom in and out.
The popular version says the great powers forgot Ada Kaleh at the Congress of Berlin, leaving it Ottoman by mistake until 1923. The documents say otherwise. The preliminary Treaty of San Stefano, of March 1878, ordered the fortress evacuated and razed. Instead Vienna and Constantinople came to their own arrangement, and the Congress did not take the matter up. The story of the forgotten island turns up in travel writing of the 1930s.
The outline comes from the Romanian army’s 1:20,000 artillery plan, sheet 2347 “Ada Kaleh”, printed in 1930, which geo-spatial.org publishes georeferenced. On that map the island was 1,398 metres long, at most 385 metres wide and about 35 hectares in area. The 1.7–1.75 kilometres repeated in encyclopedias may include the gravel bars exposed at low water. The coordinates in Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap fall 300–500 metres from the island, in the old river channel. On the 1930 map the island’s centre is at 44.7137° N, 22.4500° E.
The bastions, ditches, streets and every building come from the “Plan de situație. Insula Ada-Kaleh”, drawing E.18 of the Iron Gates Administration, at 1:5,000, undated, held by the Historical Archive in Negotin. It was fitted to the 1930 map with an error of about 10 metres. The heights of the houses, the mosque and the minaret are estimated from photographs and from the architects’ survey drawings of 1964–1967. No source found gives the height of the walls, so it is approximated.
The mountains come from the Copernicus GLO-30 digital elevation model. That model sees nothing below today’s water, so the valley as it was before the dam is reconstructed: the Danube’s channel follows the banks on the 1930 map, where the river stood at 44 metres; the “(48)” printed by the island’s name appears to be its height. The water levels for 1970–1972 are reconstructed too, because no dated readings were found; they rest on the photograph of 20 August 1970, the history of the lock and the 69.5-metre maximum set by the Romanian–Yugoslav convention. All heights are in metres above sea level; the difference between the sources’ reference systems is under a metre.
Which houses were still standing in 1969 is not recorded house by house. The model shows them pulled down, with stubs of wall, as they appear in the August 1970 photograph. Which way the minaret fell, where Miskin Baba’s tomb stood and the exact height of the walls are unknown. Trees are placed on the orchard and garden marks of the 1:5,000 plan.
The first version of this page, from August 2026, repeated the story of the island forgotten at Berlin and gave it a length of 1.7 kilometres and 30 metres of water overhead. Those are corrected here. Thirty metres is how much the water rose at the dam; at the island it rose by about 25.
