Sulina’s cemetery, Danube Delta, Romania
Entering its Delta at Tulcea, the Danube carries in its waters all hopes, wishes and sorrows from the heart of Europe. Like messages in the bottle they inch toward the large sea, together with roots and mud from all the lands the great river passes.
All these dreams are clinging maybe on the shores like a last refuge before being swept into the Black Sea. Sulina feels like one of this dreams, hooked on the shore with its last strength not to be swept away. Once a famous and prosperous free port, a status that it maintains even today, Sulina is enjoying a relaxed retirement, fishing and watching beautiful sunsets in an tranquil atmosphere that you rarely can still see in the stacatto of the modern society.
Its cosmopolitan history is only hinted today by the remaining buildings of the city, a combination of Turkish, Greek and Italianate. The old pictures of the city show a dynamic life on the promenade, its main Gambini Hotel today completely ruined still bringing a perfume of bygone eras. Its far flung position made the city to be under the radar of the Communist reconstruction, and no matter that the new buildings still make some parts of the center, the prevalent destruction did not stamp out the traditional look. The promenade on the Danube makes for a pleasant stroll, even in a winter evening, the city having a pleasantly mild climate. The small lighthouse is another trip in the past.
The traffic on the Danube used to be intense in a time when flights and trucks were not prevalent. In the 19th and 20th century this area was the hub of the Fluvial transportation, But with the development of the Danube-Black sea canal during the last years of the Communist regime, a project both as technical but also human engineering, the building of the canal being used originally as a work colony for the opponents of the regime, the traffic was diverted out of the Delta, leaving this part of the country as one beautiful National park.
But nowhere else you can see better the history of the city than in its cemetery, a cemetery of the Danube commission, where Greeks, Italians, Russians, Germans, Brits and many mores are entombed together, near the Romanians, all with their crosses or stones, each to his own belief. It is so diverse that you can find even a pirate tomb, with a skull carved in the funerary stone.
From the tomb another 30 minutes walk bring you on a beach on the Black Sea, very close from where finally the Danube mingles its waters and dreams to the planetary ocean, like souls coming back to their original matrix. Enjoy the sunset!
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