Radio România Internațional

Tag: waterway

  • By ship from Vienna to Constantinople

    By ship from Vienna to Constantinople

    Under Ottoman influence for several centuries, the Romanian Principalities had been looking for and eventually found a new path in the first half of the 19th century. It was the path to modernization and Europeanization. Europe’s geopolitical history of the first half of the 19th century created the context for the Western ideas and the determination of elites to lead to the emergence of the Romanian state. Two of the powerful ideas of the time were: to put the Danube River at the center of the European community and to expand the West towards the East. People travelled by ship on the Danube between Vienna and Constantinople and that widened their horizon, realizing that commercial transport on the big river was profitable.



    The historian Constantin Ardeleanu is the author of the book “A cruise from Vienna to Constantinople. Travelers, spaces, images, 1830-1860”. It is a book of history viewed through the eyes of those who traveled on the route between the two great empires, the Habsburg and the Ottoman empires.



    How did the Romanian society receive the changes from the West, the technological innovations, is the first question to which historian Constantin Ardeleanu answered: “I would say that the Romanian society received those changes with openness. And with fear, initially, but also with a good understanding of the usefulness of those modern technologies. The Romanian space got connected to travel routes in Europe after the introduction of steam navigation on the river. This happened as of the 1830s and the symbolic moment was April 1834, when the first steamer, belonging to the first Austrian steam navigation company, arrived in a Romanian port. A reception ceremony was held, the Romanian elites quickly embraced the innovation, which they knew of from their travels abroad, and made full use of it equally to the West, to Vienna, and from there to the rest of Western Europe, through Constantinople, to the east and to the Holy Land, to Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean. However, for the ordinary people, that terrible invention was hard to understand, but they were aware of it. And this was because the ship and its modern technology had a specific form of territoriality.”



    The Danube was, undoubtedly, the axis of modernization for Romanians. This is how it was seen at the time, and although almost two centuries have passed since then, its current importance has remained intact. Here is historian Constantin Ardeleanu with more details: “This relationship with the Danube is very important, it was the first natural highway that connected us to the world. Undoubtedly, it needed some changes that were made both in the Iron Gates area and the Danube Delta area, in order to ensure the function of pan-European waterway. It was the Austrian company DDSG (Donau-Dampfschiffahrts-Gesellschaft) that came to introduce these lines between Vienna and Constantinople as part of an investment meant to connect the south-east of Europe. I was saying that the Danube was the main waterway that connected the Romanians to the world, hence the name ‘the Danube Principalities’ given to the Romanian Principalities. When this term was concocted, Serbia was also included in the Danube Principalities, but later, during the Crimean War of 1853-1856, the name ‘the Danube Principalities’ was used almost exclusively for Muntenia — Wallachia and Moldavia.”



    1830-1860 is the period chosen by Constantin Ardeleanu to imagine a journey on the Danube from Vienna to Constantinople. We asked him why he chose this period: “This period represents the start and the apogee of this Danube route between Vienna and Constantinople. 1830 is the year when the Austrian company, in British partnership, introduced a line on the Danube between Vienna and Budapest. This is how the connection of the Habsburg space through the Danube waterway started. Then steam navigation on the Danube was introduced, which reached the Romanian space in 1834, as I already said. 1860 was a year in which railway competition became increasingly important. The waterway went into decline with the introduction of the railways into the Habsburg space first. Starting with this decade of the 1860s, the same happened in the Romanian space. In 1860, the first railway in the Romanian space was built in ​​the Danube Delta area, namely the railway from Cernavoda to Constanța, which in a way short-circuited the Danube route. Travelers no longer needed to make a detour through Brăila and Galați, thus saving a few days. A new rush to speed up the process began, after reducing the travel time between Vienna and Constantinople and other destinations.”



    You may wonder who was traveling on the Danube? There were several types of travelers. First, there were the merchants and the military, the oldest travelers, the most adventurous spirits ever. Then there were the spiritual pilgrims to Mount Athos and to the holy lands of Jerusalem and Palestine. But there also emerged a new category, the tourists. The rich people wanted to discover the world and thus boarded on ships that took them across the Danube to the wide world. A cruise on the Danube from Vienna to Constantinople in the 19th century also brought them to Romania, which immediately adopted the models of the time. (LS)

  • Rearranging the Danube Delta

    Rearranging the Danube Delta

    The Danube Delta as it is today is one of natures magical creations. It is also an epitome of mans capacity to transform the environment according to his thirst for knowledge and his needs. To a significant extent, the Danube Delta of today is a perfect example of mans ability to rearrange it, with such an endeavor being documented as early as the mid-19th century, so much so that the most important works carried by man, using its intelligence, were aimed at rearranging River Danube in order to facilitate navigation for commercial vessels, thus encouraging economic progress and human mobility.



    The rearrangement of the Danube Delta was a grandiose project. It targeted the transformation of the river in its entirety into a pan-European navigable waterway. A quick look at a map of the Danube Delta dated 1856, but also a look at one of the Deltas present-day maps reveals the numerous watercourse rearrangement works for the Danubes Sulina Arm, which was eventually turned into a navigable waterway. The historian Constantin Ardeleanu with the “Lower Danube” University in Galati is a specialist in the history of the rearrangement works for the Delta.



    Constantin Ardeleanu:


    “It was an extremely interesting technical work, initiated in 1856 and completed all throughout the following timeframe. It has continued to this day, yet there are technical operations that need to be carried in Sulina, to maintain the navigability of the river. What has been most important and literally groundbreaking all along was the manner in which the works were conducted. A personality of world engineering coordinated the works, his name was Charles Hartley, he also scooped a great number of prestigious awards for everything he did at the Danube. Later on, he was appointed a technical consultant for the Suez Commission and contributed to the navigabilization of one of the waterways that was most vital for world trade.”



    West of Tulcea, to the north, the Chilia arm branches off from the Danube, while east of the city, the Sfantu Gheorghe arm branches off from the Sulina Arm, to the south. Of the three arms, the one in the middle would be chosen as the main waterway. The 71-kilometre long Sulina Canal flew into the Black Sea next to the harbor of Sulina, a fishermens village that later grew into one of Romanias most cosmopolitan cities. By and large, rearrangement works consisted in the cutting of the bends and meanders made by the water course, in the consolidation of the banks and the dredging of the bottom so that the river may be deeper.



    Historian Constantin Ardeleanu:


    “Works began in 1857, when one of the arms was supposed to be picked for rearrangement works. There were several options, Hartley shared the opinion that the Sfantu Gheorghe arm was more favorable for such works than Sulina. Other engineers thought that financially, the Sulina arm was more prone to being rendered navigable. Works proper began in 1858 and the Sulina dams, which can still be seen today, were inaugurated in 1861. As a direct outcome of the works, the depth of the Danube over the Sulina sandbar, the bank of sand that was created there, increased from around 2.5 meters in 1856 to 4 or 5 meters five years later, and never ceased to increase until it reached the navigable level of 8 meters, roughly maintaining the same level to this day.”



    Why was such a grandiose work needed? Explanations have to do with geopolitics and economy. For many centuries, the Danube rivermouths had been under the control of the Ottoman Empire, which was not so keen on conducting large-scale construction works.



    Russias unabated offensive towards the south that began in the first half of the 18th century proved effective, pushing the Ottoman influence further south. However, Russia, which became the guaranteeing power for the Romanian Principalities after the Adrianopol Peace Treay in 1829, did not deem Danube as being important for its economy. Navigation in the area where River Danube flowed into the Black Sea was a difficult one, while the trade flow was scarce, if not chaotic. Alluvial sediments at the Danube rivermouths were a hindrance to a systematic, safe and controlled navigation process. So complex and multidisciplinary was the work of the European Danube Commissions chief engineer, Charles Hartley, that the supervisor of the grandiose project for the rearrangement of the Danube was dubbed ” the father of the Danube”.



    Constantin Ardeleanu:


    “For River Danube, what the engineers did, under the supervision of Hartley, was not only a work of utmost importance, it was also a scientific one. The Danube Delta is one of the worlds best-known sites having the form of a delta proper, if we try to understand how nature works. Those people were not just engineers who built several dams in Sulina, they were also prominent scientists who first understood how a delta worked: what the amount was, of the alluvial sediments it carried, how that amount was distributed among the three main arms of the Danube, what had to be done so that the Danube could become a navigable waterway for big tonnage vessels. It was a work of understanding a river, prior to becoming, in Hartleys own words, a work of taming and transforming it for the benefit of human communities.



    Rearranging the Danube Delta and the emergence of the Sulina Canal meant the opening up to the sea of Romanian territories. From an economic point of view, it was the “breath of fresh air” the Romanian state was granted, for its own projects.


    (Translation by Eugen Nasta)