Sulina · Danube Delta
In 1857 the nearest sea shore was about 740 metres from the lighthouse at Sulina. Today the nearest beach is 2.1 kilometres away, and the end of the jetties more than 8. In between, the European Commission of the Danube made ten cuts in the Sulina arm, took 27 bends out of the route and made it 21.9 kilometres shorter. First, sail the arm as it was.
Scroll: you go up the arm to the fork, then sail down to the sea.
Of the Danube's three arms, Sulina is the middle one. In 1856 it had, among many others, eleven especially tight bends, with a radius under a thousand feet (about 300 metres), and ten shifting sandbanks. Over the banks, at low water, there were between 2.4 and 4 metres of water.
On the map the old route is in yellow. The two big loops in the middle, by the village of Mila 23 and below Crișan, still exist and are called Dunărea Veche, the Old Danube.
At Ceatal Sfântul Gheorghe, below Tulcea, the river splits: the St George arm heads south, the Sulina arm east. This is where the ships' route to the sea begins.
In 1856 the bed of the arm had not yet been dredged. The Commission began dredging only in August 1857.
The first kilometres are a string of small bends. The Commission named them after the places, Argagni, Masurale, Papadia, Veniko, and counted them by milestones, in nautical miles reckoned upstream from Sulina.
After Gorgova the arm swung north in two big loops, which the engineers called together the Great M. The first loop, by Mila 23, is about 20 kilometres long on today's map, and brought a ship only 12.8 closer to the sea.
The village of Mila 23 now sits on the first loop.
From Crișan the route climbed north again, past Ceamurli, and came back only after another 17 kilometres, just 7.6 kilometres further downstream.
On the old route, as rebuilt here, the fork to the Sulina lighthouse comes to about 88 kilometres. In 1856 only 9 feet of water, under 3 metres, covered the sandbar at the mouth of the arm. According to Hartley, three ships in four took their cargo on in the roadstead, from lighters.
"…wild open seaboard strewn with wrecks…"
On a single night in the winter of 1855, Hartley wrote, 24 sailing ships and 60 lighters were driven ashore, and more than 300 people died.
The Treaty of Paris, of 30 March 1856, created the European Commission of the Danube, with delegates from seven states. A technical commission had proposed a canal with locks at St George, and in December 1858 six of the seven delegates voted for it. The scheme was abandoned, and the first work was done at the Sulina mouth. Between 1858 and 1861 the Commission built two jetties reaching out into the sea: the northern one 1,412 metres long, the southern one 914.
By 1871 the depth over the bar had risen from 9 to 19 feet, from 2.7 to 5.8 metres.
Cut I
The first cut was small: a tight bend at the top of the Great M, at mile 23–24 of the old arm, replaced by a short canal.
The Commission's 1931 map numbers ten cuts, in the order they were made. We follow them one by one.
Cuts II and III
The cut at Ceatal Sfântul Gheorghe, made between 1880 and 1882, straightened the entrance to the arm. The 1931 map does not draw the bend it replaced, so it does not appear here. In 1883–1884 the bend at Papadia, at mile 36, was cut.
Cuts IV, V and VI
Three cuts in three years: Upper Argagni (1885–1886), Lower Argagni (September 1886 to October 1887) and Masurale (spring 1888 to 12 June 1889).
Besides the cuts, the Commission reinforced the banks. By 1931 it had built 167 groynes, short dykes set across the current, and almost 92 kilometres of revetted bank.
Cut VII
On 3 June 1890 the first big cut began: a straight canal 5 nautical miles, or about 9 kilometres, long, below Crișan. It opened on 7 December 1893. The loop at Ceamurli was left off the ships' route.
Cuts VIII and IX
Between 29 March 1894 and 21 October 1897 the Gorgova–Veniko loop, from mile 31 to mile 37, was cut. Between August 1897 and October 1898, one more bend at Argagni. On the 1931 map this last bend is the hardest to read, and its position here is the least certain.
Cut X
The last cut began on 5 October 1898 and was finished on 19 September 1902. It cut off the first loop of the Great M too, straight across Lake Obretin, between two artificial banks.
We set off from the fork again. According to the Commission's 1931 map, the ten cuts took 27 bends out of the route.
The old loops stay on the left. The two big ones are still on the map today, as arms of water.
On its 1931 map, the Commission wrote that the cuts shortened the river by 11 nautical miles and 5,125 English feet, that is, 21.9 kilometres.
Measured on today's map, the route from the fork to the old lighthouse is 63.5 kilometres. The old route, as rebuilt here, came to about 88.
Between 1856 and 1926 the shallowest depth on the arm went from 8 feet, 2.4 metres, to never less than 23½ feet, 7.2 metres, from 1926, and 24 feet for most of the year.
The lighthouse
On the plan of the mouth the Commission surveyed in October 1857, the lighthouse stands on the right bank of the arm, about 430 metres from its mouth. The sea shore is about 740 metres away. In 1856 the lighthouse was run by a concessionaire of the Ottoman government; the Commission took over the lighthouses after the Treaty of Berlin, in 1878.
The Commission's 1931 book describes it as a round white tower, its lantern under a green dome, the light 21 metres above the water. A photo caption on Wikipedia gives it as completed in November 1870; the Commission's book gives no year of construction. A 2022 article cites geotechnical surveys from 2017 suggesting that the Commission rebuilt an older, Russian tower. We found no primary source for this.
In 1872, a decade after the first jetties, their ends lay 1.3–1.4 kilometres from the lighthouse. The shore south of the jetties had moved too: it was now about 990 metres away.
The white lines are the shorelines on the Commission's plans. The faintest are the oldest.
On the plan of November 1886 the shore south of the jetties is 1.1 kilometres from the lighthouse. Between 1872 and 1886 it had moved about 100 metres. By 1930 it would move another half a kilometre.
Between 1921 and 1930 the Commission extended the jetties by almost three more kilometres. On 25 November 1930 the provisional light at the end of the north jetty was lit. The jetty heads were then 4.1–4.2 kilometres from the old lighthouse, and the shore to the south 1.6.
On today's map, the old lighthouse is 2.1 kilometres from the beach to the south-east and 8.3 from the end of the jetties. Along the south jetty, the beach was one kilometre from the lighthouse in 1872. On today's map, where the jetty merges into the shore, it is about 4.5 kilometres. The lighthouse is a museum, and ships pass it on the canal.
Pick a year, then turn the map with the mouse or a finger. The wheel, a two-finger pinch or the + and − buttons zoom in and out.
Numbers, names and years are from the European Commission of the Danube's 1931 map. The miles are those of the old arm, counted upstream from Sulina. After the cuts the arm was given new milestones, so these numbers do not match today's markers.
| No. | Place | Old mile | Years |
|---|---|---|---|
| I | The Little M | 23–24 | 1868–1869 |
| II | Ceatal Sfântul Gheorghe (the St George fork) | 45 | 1880–1882 |
| III | Papadia | 36 | 1883–1884 |
| IV | Upper Argagni | 42–43 | 1885–1886 |
| V | Lower Argagni | 39–40 | 1886–1887 |
| VI | Masurale | 38 | 1888–1889 |
| VII | The Great M, lower half | 8–18 | 1890–1893 |
| VIII | Gorgova–Veniko | 31–37 | 1894–1897 |
| IX | Argagni | 40½–42 | 1897–1898 |
| X | The Great M, upper half, through Lake Obretin | 18–27 | 1898–1902 |
The sources do not agree everywhere. The text of the same 1931 book also speaks of "nine cuts". Another author quoted there, Stourdza, counts 16 bends and gives the length as 83.3 kilometres before and 60.6 after. A plate in the Commission's 1887 atlas dates a cut "of the M" to 1874–1875, not 1868–1869. Here we follow the 1931 map.
The European Commission of the Danube was born of the Treaty of Paris, signed on 30 March 1856 after the Crimean War. It first met at Galați on 4 November 1856, with delegates from Austria, France, Britain, Prussia, Russia, Sardinia and the Ottoman Empire. Its mandate was for two years. It lasted 82.
The Commission paid for its works with dues on the ships leaving by Sulina, about £80,000 a year around 1900. It had its own flag, with the letters C.E.D., a hospital for seamen of every country, and British engineers: Charles Hartley designed the works and ran them until 1872, then the Dane Charles Kuhl carried them on. The Treaty of Berlin of 1878 gave the Delta to Romania, which became a full member of the Commission. The works and navigation stayed with the Commission.
By around 1900, the freight on a ton of cargo from Galați and Brăila to the North Sea ports had fallen from 50 shillings to 12s 6d. By the Commission's reckoning, the arm carried 7% of the Danube's water in 1856 and 14% in 1928.
The international administration at the mouths ended only with the Sinaia Arrangement of 18 August 1938, in force from May 1939, which handed it to the Romanian state. For the treaty that created the Commission, see The Peace of Paris, 1856. For a trip to the Delta today, by boat to Sulina, see the Danube Delta guide.
Today's canal, the lakes and the two surviving loops of the Great M, called Dunărea Veche, come from OpenStreetMap. On them the route can be measured directly: 72.5 kilometres from the fork to the end of the jetties, 63.5 of them to the old lighthouse.
Eight smaller bends no longer exist as arms of water. We took them from the Commission's 1931 map, "Coupures exécutées dans le bras de Soulina de 1868 à 1902", drawn as one long strip. We laid it over today's canal stretch by stretch, using the points both show: the fork, Gorgova, Crișan and Sulina. Where we can check, on the two big loops, the 1931 drawing typically lies about a kilometre from the real arm. The small bends may therefore be out by up to a kilometre. Cut II has no bend drawn, and cut IX is hard to read.
The old route rebuilt here comes out about 24 kilometres longer than today's, to the lighthouse. The Commission measured 21.9. The difference comes mostly from the small bends, placed approximately, and from different end points. The figure we give as the result is the Commission's.
The old shorelines and the jetties are from the Commission's plans of the Sulina mouth: October 1857 and July 1930 from the annexes to the 1931 book, March 1872 and November 1886 from the 1887 atlas. Each plan is placed with the lighthouse as origin, using its own north arrow and scale, to within 5 to 26 metres. The 1857 and 1872 plans cover mainly the shore to the south; the 1857 shore to the north is uncertain. Today's shore is from OpenStreetMap. The distance from the lighthouse to the beach, 2.1 kilometres, is our own measurement on today's map. The Delta is flat, so no relief is drawn.
We found no period source for how many hours the cuts saved. The exact construction date of the lighthouse is not certain either: a Wikipedia caption says 1870, and other sources speak of an older tower, rebuilt. The ship, the lighthouse and the water of the arms are drawn larger than life, so that they show from above.
The first version of this page, from September 2026, told the Commission's story in four chapters. Now the route and the cuts can be followed on the map. The facts about the treaty and the Commission are unchanged.