Halfway down the Danube

Tulcea

It's pronounced TOOL-cha, and it's the jumping-off point for trips into the Delta.

Tulcea is a pleasant town, much nicer than we expected. The Lonely Planet dismisses it with a couple of lines -- "you won't want to spend much time here before heading off to the Delta" -- but I liked it. There's a modest esplanade along the riverfront, and a couple of nice little parks. Lots of shops and restaurants, many of them new-looking... you can see that some money has come in recently.

Of course, there's also the standard post-Communist gigantic empty central square. They've nibbled around the edges of it with trees and benches, but there's still a good acre of completely useless bare concrete space, the hot sun beating down on it, with no shelter and no decoration but an equestrian statue of Old King Mircea.

And speaking of post-Communism, there's also a gigantic aluminim refinery just outside of town. You can see its smokestacks and towers from the esplanade. It really seems like the Romanian Communist leadership placed major industrial works in all the most beautiful sites in the country. The aluminum works at Tulcea isn't quite as bad as the oil refinery that dominates the beach at Mamaia, but it's up there.

We came into Tulcea from the west, and it was a surprisingly nice and scenic drive. The two-lane road from the Braila ferry runs parallel to the Danube, but a mile or two inland. On one side are the hills of upper Dobrogea...

...brief geographical digression here. We all know that the Danube has a big kink at the end, yes? Instead of flowing straight east into the Black Sea, it suddenly turns north for about 120 miles and then turns east.

Well, the reason for this is that there's a range of hills along the coast of the Black Sea. In American terms, it's as if a piece of the Ozarks had been snapped off and moved 300 miles south to the Gulf Coast, so that the Mississippi suddenly had to swing around and reach the sea somewhere over in Texas. The region inside the "kink" is Dobrogea.

So, driving from Braila to Tulcea, you have the rugged hills of northern Dobrogea on one side, and the Danube on the other. And the Danube is just spreading out into the Delta. So it's a huge river surrounded by marshes and lakes... some reclaimed and turned into sheep meadows, but most still half-wild wetland. The road stays at the edge of the hills, so it's perpetually going up and down and turning, giving you ever-changing views of marshes, fields, little lakes shining in the sun. And every few kilometers you go through another pleasant-looking little village.

It's nice. Tulcea is supposed to be a poor judet, and certainly the villages didn't look rich or even prosperous. But neither did they have that dusty, run-down look so common in the south of Romania. The houses were well kept, and there were flower gardens everywhere. You had the feeling that, for one reason or another, Communism hadn't really managed to get its teeth into the people here.

Oh, and the people themselves looked a little different. Dobrogea was part of the Ottoman Empire until 1878... you could walk from Tulcea south 400 miles to Istanbul, and you'd be on Turkish territory continuously all the way. And the Turkish legacy lives on. Several of the towns have very Turkish-sounding names (Babadag, Mahmudia), and several of the villages had mosques.

Well: for about 200 years, Dobrogea was the refugee center of the Ottoman Empire. Ottoman settlers driven out of Hungary and the Banat ended up there, and so did Crimean Tatars from Russia. They mingled with a pre-existing population of Romanians, Gypsies, and four or five different sorts of Slav... Russians, Bulgarians, Ukrainians, you name it. The hills of Dobrogea and the marshes of the lower Danube became ethnic catchbasins, impromptu melting pots.

So the people just look different. Very mixed, from Celtic-looking blondes to folks as dark as Indians. Several generations of Romanianization have flattened out most of the cultural differences, but the sheer physical variety is still pretty striking.

And not all the cultural differences have been flattened. There are still large Muslim minorities, Turks and Tatars. Nobody seems to be paying any attention, but after 2007, these folks will be the oldest large Muslim communities in the EU.

Posted by douglas at May 31, 2005 01:52 PM