Marius Comper

An Ottoman island on the Danube · 1430–1970

Forty-Five Years on Paper, Thirty Metres of Water

In 1878, the great powers of Europe divided up what remained of the Ottoman Empire north of the Danube — and forgot an island. For forty-five years, Ada Kaleh remained, by a treaty's oversight, a fragment of the Sultanate surrounded on every side by states that recognised Ottoman sovereignty nowhere else. By the time the oversight was finally corrected, the Sultanate itself no longer existed. And forty-seven years after that, a dam raised the Danube thirty metres and settled the question of sovereignty for good: it drowned the island.

44°43′N 22°27′E · 3 km downstream of Orșova 1.7 × 0.45 km · roughly 0.87 km² 1430–1970 · 540 documented years
45 years how long the island stayed forgotten Ottoman territory, between the Congress of Berlin (1878) and the Treaty of Lausanne (1923)
8.3% of the island's 540 documented years, spent as a diplomatic anomaly
over 30 m how far the Danube rose once the Iron Gate I dam was completed
637 residents counted in the 1913 census, across 171 households

The island's chronoscope

Drag the slider from 1430 to 1970 and watch who nominally held the island at each turn — and what, in the end, happened to the paper itself.

1430

Ottoman Empire Austrian occupation Romania Underwater

I. An island built out of oversight

Three kilometres downstream of Orșova, the Danube hid, until 1970, an island 1.7 kilometres long and under half a kilometre wide — less than a square kilometre of sand and rock, documented since 22 February 1430, in a charter of the Teutonic Knights.

The Ottomans took the island through the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699 and held it for nearly three centuries, with brief interruptions: Austrian forces captured it in 1716–1718 and again in 1789, each time returning it by treaty — the last time at Sistova, in 1791. Between 1718 and 1738, the Habsburgs built a Vauban-style fortress on it, bastions and gun ports facing both banks; the Ottomans retook it after a four-month siege in 1738 and kept it, uninterrupted, into the twentieth century.

II. Forty-five years of a diplomatic error

In 1878, at the Congress of Berlin, the great powers redrew the Balkans: Romania and Serbia gained full independence, and the Ottoman Empire lost nearly everything it still held north of the Danube. The island of Ada Kaleh appears in no article of the treaty. The diplomats simply forgot it, and it remained, legally, the Sultan's territory — a fragment of the Ottoman Empire surrounded on every side by a state that recognised Ottoman sovereignty nowhere else along the river.

Austria-Hungary unilaterally claimed it in 1913, a gesture the Porte never recognised. Romania asserted sovereignty after Trianon, in 1920. Only on 24 July 1923, through the Treaty of Lausanne, did the island formally become Romanian territory. The Ottoman Sultanate had been abolished eight months earlier, in November 1922: for a brief stretch, Ada Kaleh remained, on paper, the territory of a state that no longer existed.

The arithmetic of a treaty's error

The island appears in records from 1430 to 1970 — 540 years. The anomaly between Berlin and Lausanne lasted 45 years. The ratio between the two figures is 8.3%: nearly a tenth of the island's entire documented life passed as an uncorrected treaty error.

III. The bazaar in the middle of the river

For as long as the anomaly lasted, Ada Kaleh functioned as a free port in the middle of the Danube. The 1913 census recorded 637 residents across 171 households, nearly all Turks and Muslim Roma who had settled there after the Ottoman Empire lost the surrounding province. The island's bazaar sold halva, coffee boiled in hot sand, rosewater and tobacco, free of any neighbouring state's customs duties — a legal gap worked commercially, on a small but steady scale, for decades.

The island's mosque, built in 1903 on the site of a former Franciscan monastery, had received as a gift from Sultan Abdul Hamid II a carpet it would keep until the final years before the flooding.

After Lausanne, successive waves of departure thinned the community: emigration to Istanbul in the years following the treaty, a further wave to Turkey in the 1930s, and in 1951 some Turkish families were forcibly resettled to the Bărăgan Plain, alongside other minorities the communist regime deemed unsafe. By 1967, the remaining population had shrunk to a few hundred people.

IV. The reason it disappeared

The island's end was not political but energetic. Between 1964 and 1972, Romania and Yugoslavia jointly built the Iron Gate I hydroelectric plant, the largest on the Danube. The Gura Văii dam raised the river's level more than thirty metres across dozens of kilometres upstream, flooding three thousand five hundred and sixty hectares and ten localities, from the old town of Orșova to the villages of Eșelnița, Dubova and Plavișevița.

The state initially allocated 23,984,000 lei for archaeological research and for relocating monuments, a sum later cut to less than half. A few of the fortress gates, a Turkish house and the cemetery were moved to nearby Șimian Island; the mosque's carpet had already reached the Grand Mosque of Constanța in 1965. The rest — the Vauban fortress, the houses, the minaret — stayed where it stood.

The last residents left in 1967. The water rose gradually, and by 1970 the island was completely covered.

V. What remains

Today, Șimian Island still holds a few of the fortress gates, a reconstructed Turkish house, and the headstones moved from the old cemetery. The carpet still covers the floor of the mosque in Constanța. The rest — the Vauban bastions, the bazaar, the minaret — rests at the bottom, somewhere beneath today's reservoir.

A boat passing that stretch of the Danube now sails over five hundred and forty years of history, with no marker on the surface.

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