Within 44 km of the Black Sea, the Danube still has 290 km to go

#Why doesn’t the Danube flow into the sea at Constanța?

Because the Dobruja plateau is in the way. Romania’s water authority describes the river’s course like this: below Silistra the hills of Dobruja force the Danube to turn from east to north, in a very large curve, and it keeps that direction as far as Galați, where it swings east towards the sea. Just below Cernavodă, on that northward stretch, it comes nearest to the sea: 44 km in a straight line to the coast. Romania’s canal administration puts it in one sentence: about 300 km before the river reaches the sea, it comes within 60 km of the coast, along a straight line across the plateau. Constanța is a little farther: measured between the two town centres, Cernavodă to Constanța, the gap is 53 km.

Constanța, now a city of a quarter of a million, sits at the far end of that line, on a small rocky peninsula. Most of what later joined it to the river was an attempt to get the Danube’s cargo across the plateau without the long detour through the delta: a railway, a bridge, a canal. The three earthworks on the plateau, known as Trajan’s Wall, belong to an earlier story, as fortifications whose builders are still argued over. Scroll through the map to watch each arrive, or drag the year yourself.

#Did Trajan build Trajan’s Wall?

Probably not, and certainly not all of it. The name, Valul lui Traian in Romanian, covers three separate earthworks between Cernavodă and Constanța. The Small Earthen Dyke runs 61 km with its ditch on the south side; the Large Earthen Dyke runs 54 km with ditches on both sides, the northern one 12 m wide and over 4 m deep; the Stone Dyke runs 59 km with its ditch to the north and 26 forts along it.

Their order is clear from where they cross. For about 4 km in the west the Large Dyke was built on top of the Small one, so it is later; between Castelu and Poarta Albă the Stone Dyke cuts through the Large one, so it is later still. Excavations at Făclia in 2011 and 2012, ahead of the A2 motorway, found ninth-century pottery “in abundance” on the Large Dyke. The Stone Dyke has long been dated by a Cyrillic inscription of 943 found nearby; the historian Florin Curta notes that it was turned up in 1950 by prisoners digging the first canal, in circumstances he calls “quite dubious”. The Small Dyke, the oldest, is still undated.

Whether the builders were Byzantines or the First Bulgarian Empire, both of which held this land at times in those centuries, is still argued. The emperor’s name had been attached to such earthworks long before anyone dug into them: L’Illustration printed this view in 1854.

#When did the railway reach Constanța?

On 4 October 1860, eighteen years before Romania owned the town. The Ottoman government had granted a British company, the Danube and Black Sea Railway, a 99-year concession in 1857 for a line its promoters said would be “less than forty miles long”. Its pitch was the gap itself. Grain from the lower Danube otherwise went down through the delta and out at Sulina, where delays were common. Cernavodă, British engineers reported in 1856, lay close to the centre of the Danube grain trade.

The line was about 65 km long; the engineer John Trevor Barkley was among its builders. It was the first railway of the Ottoman state in its European provinces, though not the first in today’s Romania: a line in the Banat, the region in today’s far west, then Austrian, had opened in 1854.

By the old route these two points were three hundred miles apart. Travellers by the railway thus economize two hundred and sixty miles, besides avoiding the many dangers attendant on the navigation of the Danube and the delays so common at the Sulina mouth of that river.

Küstendje was then a small and battered place. A Greek writer in 1859 put it at no more than 3,000 people. After the Treaty of Berlin gave northern Dobruja to Romania in 1878, the new state bought the railway in 1882, built the bridge at Cernavodă to join it to Bucharest in 1895, and turned the harbour into a modern port between 1896 and 1909. In 1930 the census counted 59,164 people.

#Who dug the Danube–Black Sea Canal, and how many died?

The canal was dug twice. The first attempt was decided by the Politburo of the Romanian Workers’ Party on 25 May 1949, on a route fixed by Soviet surveyors: up the Carasu valley from Cernavodă to Poarta Albă, then north over the Nazarcea hill to the sea at Capul Midia, 65 to 70 km in all. The idea came from Stalin, according to memoirs cited by the Romanian presidency’s 2006 commission on the communist dictatorship.

The canal holds “a special place on the map of the Romanian Gulag”, in the commission’s words. Its report lists colonies at Cernavodă, Saligny, Km 5, Km 31, Poarta Albă, Galeș, Noua Culme, Tașaul, Peninsula and Capul Midia. Counts it cites from the historian Marian Cojoc rise from 6,400 prisoners in September 1949 to 20,768 in November 1952, when they made up 82.5% of the canal’s workers. Another chapter of the same report gives a minimal estimate of 40,000 to 60,000 prisoners at any one time; the two figures have not been reconciled.

Nobody knows how many died. The Interior Ministry’s own review in 1968 recorded 656 deaths, but the officer in charge of the labour units testified that, on the ministry’s orders, deaths had for a long time not been reported to the local council. The commission estimates that “several thousand” political prisoners died. On 18 July 1953, four months after Stalin’s death, the works were stopped.

Construction started again in 1975 and 1976, up the same Carasu valley but on to Agigea, south of Constanța, and the canal opened on 26 May 1984: 64.4 km long, 90 m wide and 7 m deep, with twin locks at Cernavodă and Agigea. The second dig drew on other labour: civilian construction enterprises, the army’s hydrotechnical brigade, whose conscripts numbered up to 9,500 at the peak according to the historian Ana-Olivia Șerban, and school and university students on compulsory work placements. Forced labour did not vanish: in 1977 five young men were sentenced to labour in the canal’s colonies. The northern branch followed in October 1987, from Poarta Albă to Midia Năvodari, over much the same ground as the first attempt. Its length is given as anything from 26.6 km to 34.6 km, depending on where it is measured to; the canal administration itself says 27.5 km.

The canal has a page of its own: The canal dug twice.

#Constanța and the gap: a timeline

1. 6th c. BCSettlers from Miletus found Tomis on the peninsula where old Constanța stands.
2. AD 8Augustus banishes the poet Ovid to Tomis, where he spends the rest of his life.
3. 9th–10th c.The Large Earthen Dyke and then the Stone Dyke are built across the plateau. The Small Earthen Dyke, the oldest, is undated. All three are now called Trajan’s Wall.
4. 10th c.A Byzantine emperor’s handbook names the town Constantia, a stop on the sea route south from the Danube.
5. 1857A British company wins a 99-year concession for a railway from the Danube to Küstendje.
6. 1860The railway opens on 4 October: about 40 miles, against some 300 miles by river and sea.
7. 1878The Treaty of Berlin gives northern Dobruja, Küstendje included, to Romania.
8. 1882Romania buys the railway.
9. 1895The railway crossing from Fetești to Cernavodă opens on 14/26 September. Its bridges and viaducts add up to 4,088 m, which the historian G. M. Croitoru calls the longest bridge complex on the European mainland of its day.
10. 1896Work on the modern port begins on 16 October.
11. 1909Carol I inaugurates the port, and the first of four grain stores, on 27 September (Old Style).
12. 1930The census counts 59,164 people in Constanța.
13. 1949On 25 May the party leadership decides to dig a canal from Cernavodă to the sea. Prisoners are 19% of the workforce in September 1949, 44% in May 1951 and 82.5% in November 1952.
14. 1950Prisoners digging the canal turn up a stone with a Cyrillic inscription dated 943, later used to date the Stone Dyke.
15. 1953On 18 July the works are stopped. The official toll recorded later is 656 dead; the 2006 presidential commission estimates that several thousand political prisoners died.
16. 1975–76Work starts again, on a new line that runs to the sea at Agigea, south of Constanța.
17. 1984The Danube–Black Sea Canal opens on 26 May: 64.4 km, two locks.
18. 1987The northern branch to Midia Năvodari opens in late October, roughly along the line of the 1949 canal.
19. 2023With Ukraine the destination of 51% of the goods carried, in the administration’s release, the canals carry 23.4 million tonnes, their most since at least 1990 and less than a third of what the main canal alone was designed to carry.