What was Europe doing at Sulina?

Chapter

1856 – 1865

The treaty

30 March 1856

First session

4 November 1856, Galatz

Mandate

two years, kept 82

On 30 March 1856 the Treaty of Paris ended the Crimean War and planted an experiment at the Danube mouths: a European Commission to clear the bars below Isatcha, given two years and then to be dissolved. It met first on 4 November 1856 at Galatz, with seven powers at the table and Moldova watching in a consultative seat.

The English delegate took the executive, the Frenchman the administration, and the engineers went to work with borrowed Turkish money. By 1860 traffic paid for a tariff of its own, and in 1866 the Commission borrowed on the open market at 10 per cent, pledging the tolls – a joint agent of the nations acting like a state with a treasury.

Nobody dissolved anything. The Public Act of 2 November 1865 put the Commission under international law and extended its life by five years; what was meant to last two lasted 82. The same treaty that redrew the Black Sea had created Europe's first working piece of international government.

designate and to cause to be executed the Works necessary below Isatcha, to clear the mouths of the Danube, as well as the neighbouring parts of the Sea, from the sands and other impediments which obstruct them ...

Treaty of Paris, Article XVI

Meanwhile The upriver sister body, the International Commission, drew up an act in November 1857 that nobody accepted; it waited until after 1918.

The treaty, from the diplomat’s side · Permits and timetables on today’s river

Chapter

1858 – 1902

The piers

1858–1861, 4,631 and 3,000 feet

The bar

9 feet in 1856, 24 in 1900

The branch

45 miles cut to 34 by 1902

Two years were spent arguing over Kilia, Sulina and St George; a Paris technical commission chose St George and its 17-foot sluiced canal, and in December 1858 six of the seven delegates voted for it. Then money and politics spoke, and the Commission simply made the provisional Sulina works permanent: two piers begun in 1858 and finished in 1861, the north 4,631 feet long, the south 3,000.

The bar answered at once, from 9 feet of water to 19. A new lighthouse rose at the north pier head in 1865; in 1876 the south jetty was prolonged to face it, and the depth reached 20.5 feet and stayed there from 1879 to 1895 without any dredging. In 1894 two parallel piers narrowed the river to 500 feet, and a channel 5,200 feet long at 24 feet deep, 300 feet wide between the piers and 600 outside, carried ships to open sea.

Upstream the branch gave the same fight: 45 miles from St George's Chatal to the sea, eleven bends under 1,000 feet of radius, ten shifting shoals of 8 to 13 feet. Cuttings and training walls took it to 11 feet in 1865, 13 in 1871, 15 in 1886, and the last cutting, begun in 1898 and due in 1902, left 34 straight miles at 18 feet. Hartley directed everything until 1872; the Dane Charles Kuhl executed the works after him.

The entrance to the Sulina branch was a wild open seaboard strewn with wrecks, the hulls and masts of which, sticking out of the submerged sandbanks, gave to mariners the only guide where the deepest channel was to be found.

Charles Hartley, 1873

Meanwhile In 1855, 36 of 2,928 vessels were wrecked; in 1865, only 7 of 2,676.

Chapter

1865 – 1914

The Act

2 November 1865

The flag

five strips, C.E.D. in white

Braila

1883, 11 miles above Galatz

The Public Act of 2 November 1865 made the Commission untouchable: its officers, works and funds stood under the protection of international law, and either annex could be changed by a majority vote that bound every member at once. It flew its own flag, ran a hospital for seamen of all countries, and answered to no territorial master.

London in 1871 added twelve years and extended neutrality to the staff; Berlin in 1878 admitted Romania as a free country and stretched the jurisdiction 26 miles, from Isatcha to Galatz, in complete independence of the territorial authority. London in 1883 pushed it 11 miles further, to Braila, and prolonged the Commission for 21 years, to 24 April 1904, then tacitly for three years at a time.

The flag told the story in cloth: five parallel strips, red, white, blue, white and red, the blue double height, bearing C.E.D. in white. Sulina stopped being a village of about 1,000 souls and became a wired, lit city with a cemetery the writer Jean Bart called, in 1899, the Living Cemetery.

composed of five parallel strips ... arranged in the following order of colour: red, white, blue, white, and red, the blue strip having a height double that of each of the other strips, and bearing in white the letters 'C.E.D.'

Treaty of Galatz, 1881, Article VIII

Meanwhile Between 1861 and 1881, 111 seagoing vessels were wrecked at the mouths; between 1909 and 1929, only 5.

Chapter

1918 – 1939

The Court

1926, lost on all counts

Sinaia

18 August 1938, in force May 1939

Belgrade

18 August 1948

The Commission worked on through the first two years of the war, Allies and Central Powers still meeting together, until the Treaty of Bucharest of 7 May 1918 turned it into a Commission of the Mouth for river states only. The victors undid that: the convention signed 23 July 1921 restored the European Commission over the mouths and finally gave the upriver International Commission a permanent statute.

Romania had wanted the mouths since 1881, when King Carol demanded control by Romanian officials alone; overruled in 1919 and 1921, it lost on all counts before the Permanent Court in 1926, which gave the Commission the whole maritime Danube. A League inquiry under Walker Hines reported in August 1925 that the fleet carried 25% more tonnage than before the war but traffic was only 56% of normal.

The end came as a bargain, not a verdict: the Sinaia Agreement of 18 August 1938 entered into force in May 1939 and handed the Lower Danube to a Romanian administration. A committee of experts had found Sulina almost impassable in 1938; the Vienna Arrangement swept the administration away in 1940, and the Belgrade Convention of 18 August 1948 put the river under riparian commissions only.

Without territorial possessions, it is nevertheless a distinct international entity, possessing sovereignty over the broad waters of the Danube.

Glen A. Blackburn, 1930

Meanwhile The Danube Commission that succeeded it sits at Budapest since 1954.