Slipping under the reeds

Shadows of yesteryear

The entire population feeds from the port’s life. Neither does it have anything in common with the rest of the country. Here's a colony life. A mixture of races. All nations, all types and all languages.
-- Jean Bart, Europolis, 1933

The European Union isn’t the continent’s first supranational organisation and attempt at economic integration: the Delta beat it to the punch. Lasting from 1865 to 1948 and seen as a state within a state, the European Commission of the Danube had judicial, administration and territorial control of the maritime Danube, the stretch of river that flows through the Danube Delta, ending at Sulina in present-day Romania. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, three ports competed for dominance of the Black Sea trade: Constanța, Odessa and Sulina.  

Constanța, 140 km to the south of Sulina, is a city where the past lives in architecture. Buildings from the 19th century, such as the former home of the British-owned Danube & Black Sea Railway Company, mix side by side with Roman ruins and the inevitable communist apartment blocks. Constanța’s narrowest lane, Stradela Vântului, divides the once Armenian and Greek neighbourhoods. The minaret of the Great Mahmudiye Mosque, built in 1910, watches over the city. Trees grow out of the roof of the central synagogue.

On the seaward side of the long boardwalk, the huge Constanța Casino is being restored, Art Nouveau coming back to glory. During the Belle Époque, the ‘golden age’ between 1880 and 1914, Europe’s elite swarmed over the city and it isn’t hard to imagine a young aristocrat, after betting everything on black and getting red, weaving back to the Chérica Hotel to throw himself off the top floor. But despite the loss of cultural diversity, Constanța has made it, changing with the times. The thriving port is now the largest on the Black Sea and the city’s population has grown from just over ten thousand in 1896 to more than three hundred thousand today.  

Odessa, even the name is enticingly romantic, is 170 km to the north of Sulina. First an ancient Greek settlement founded in the 6th century BCE, and then, at varying times, a trading centre and fort under the Golden Horde, Republic of Genoa and Ottoman Empire’s rule. The Russian empress Catherine the Great founded the city in 1794 and Odessa was a free port from 1819 to 1859, attracting wealthy foreign merchants.

But Odessa is more than a melting pot and nexus of trade, it is a writer’s city. Literature is embedded in its foundations. Exiled to Odessa in the 1820s, Alexander Pushkin wrote in a letter that "the air is filled with all Europe, French is spoken and there are European papers and magazines to read.” Mark Twain declared, after a visit in 1867, that it would become “one of the great cities of the Old World.” The Soviet Union’s master of the short story, Isaac Babel, and native son of Odessa wrote tales about the city’s early 20th century Jewish gangsters. Babel’s contribution to Jewish and world literature ended when Stalin’s NKVD executed him in 1940.

Another Odessa-born writer, George Golubenko who passed in 2014, once said, “Odessa is not just a city, it’s the smile of God.”

An easy city to fall in love with. Wide and leafy boulevards spring out from 19th-century Paris, not surprising since Duc de Richelieu designed the city. Before becoming the prime minister of France twice, Richelieu was appointed the Governor of Odessa in 1803 by Tsar Alexander I.

Odessa’s parks are dotted with cafes and restaurants serving national delicacies. At a local market, covering a city block, you can get unrepairable boots repaired, purchase building supplies, troll through piles of almost new clothes sold at only a fraction of western prices, and drink local wine by the jug. Ukraine’s third-largest city has a uniqueness, arising from its relative youth and multicultural beginnings, and has, like Constanța, survived the 20th century’s chaos to endure.

Then there’s Sulina, the go-to destination for a Danube Delta vacation and the only way to get there is by boat.

In summer and as the sun sets in magnificent reds, holidaymakers amble along the riverside. Middle-aged men ride scooters with fat tyres, electric caricatures of Harley-Davidsons, along the promenade's ten blocks. Sulina isn’t a big place, you can slowly walk its length in a half an hour, its breadth even less.

Some of the tourists are fresh back from boat trips through the Delta, going to places like Sfântu Gheorghe. A village where fishermen used to rake in Beluga sturgeon but now meet the demand for traditional fish soup and caviar, allegedly farmed. Others have spent the day, maybe successfully, probably not, fishing in the Sulina canal, the main tributary of the Danube River.

Old men occasionally gather to play backgammon in a small park and locals buy necessities in a convenience store, next to a tiny vegetable market and drinking hall. According to the last official census, done in 2011, the population is about three thousand and six hundred, including summer residents.

Holidaymakers continue walking up and down the strip in the soft light. Old Roma ladies hawk blankets, kids eat ice cream and teenagers flirt. There’s not too much else to do other than watch ocean-going ships steam up and down the Sulina canal. But sometimes, if the visitors are lucky, dancers spill out of the Greek club and perform, just for the heck of it, in the warm air. And they’re good, moving in rhythm to the loud Greek music.

Ecaterina Gheorghe-Dracopolu runs the club, teaching and keeping things together. She has a quiet dignity to her. The kind of class rarely seen these days. Her pride in Sulina’s Greek heritage is a million miles from hubris. Greeks first came to the mouth of the Danube River in the 7th century BCE and during the 1800s the dominant culture was Greek. In 1879, Greeks accounted for fifty-seven percent of the population: Romanians, five percent.

Of the 19th century, she says, “There were several Greek schools and they built a church. So here was the prosperity period, when the Greeks put on the imprint in their community. The Italians also did. So did the Turks.”

Today, all the dancers are Romanian.

In summertime, Sulina serves up the Delta’s mythical magic, for as your euros last, but in the grey cold winter its true self emerges. The skeletal remains of glory days long gone. The complete absence of tourists, only the old shuffling through the rain, and no more beautiful sunsets strip off the disguise.

Move back from Sulina’s promenade and the houses start to decay into empty lots of rubble and weeds. Rust and poverty streak apartment blocks, washing lines hung with damp clothing. A church rots in collapsed timber. Street dogs, abandoned shops, a horse grazing in the rain and unpaved streets. Five blocks from the river, the countryside starts.

At the town’s western edge, the communist fish factory, a hollowed out edifice of concrete and graffiti, stands testament to the last time there was an actual economy. On the other side of the canal, directly across from the shuttered restaurants, bars and shops, there’s the broken windows of a derelict naval shipyard.

Right at the edge of town, on the way to the beach, the graveyard speaks quietly of a different time, of a cosmopolitan city. Late 19th and early 20th century British, German, Italian, French and Greek tombstones mix with Orthodox crosses. There’s a fair amount of seamen lost to the depths and a statue of two English girls who drowned together in the Danube. Tucked away in one almost hidden corner, there are tombstones inscribed in Ottoman Turkish using Nastaliq calligraphy. Those with a fez on top denote the dead were either public servants or high ranking officials. The Jewish graves are unkempt, gravestones in Hebrew lost under overflowing bushes and trees or knocked over and buried in grass. Today, Sulina hosts neither mosque nor synagogue.

Twenty-one-year-old Alexandra Manole comes to Sulina each summer, her mother was born there, and not just to pick up some seasonal work and hang at the beach. She also tends the graves of her grandparents. As a member of the Romanian Orthodox Church, she lights candles at their graves so that “on the other side, they have light.”

When asked about how many young people there live in Sulina all year round, she says “I think maximum twenty. All the younger people left. There are no possibilities here. Or chances to develop in any career.”

Like Odessa, Sulina has its writer. His erotic novel Europolis describes a multicultural Sulina, a 1930s port humming with a culture and life. One of his characters is a black woman who dances “with her entire body and soul.”

But, for Bart, the fate of Sulina was sealed. He wrote that “The town is withdrawing, defeated in the battle with nature. Sulina abandoned is disappearing as a town.”

Then came World War II and, like so many places in Eastern Europe, various armies bombed the living daylights out of it. The Danube Commission formally closed shop three years after the war and Sulina continued its slow waltz of decline. Two canals built from 1976 to 1987 allowed ships to go from Constanța to the Danube River without having to go through the Delta. The 19th-century competition between three port cities ended with Sulina’s death in the twentieth.

As is often the case in the Delta, identity is fused with religion. Sulina’s small Catholic church, built in 1856, is a little back from the promenade. By the dominant Orthodox standards, it’s stripped to the marrow: some pews, a few statues, a crucifix and not an icon in sight. Giovanni Lindi is the church administrator and his family has been part of the town’s Italian community for generations.

The church stands but the community doesn’t. Giovani Lindi is one the last four Italians left in the town. As for how many still speak Italian? His answer in English is brutally simple: “No. No. Forget.”  Still, the church is a physical reminder that the Delta was once, in part, Italian. That they were here.

There’s another religious community in the Delta. A community that has kept its rituals exactly the same for well over three hundred years: the Lipovans.