On the Danube Delta

August 29, 2011

Now here’s my communist cinderblock architecture!  Welcome everyone to Constantza and Tucea Romania.  I’ve always been told that Romania is beautiful; the area we were in wasn’t.  So we got out.  After docking in Constanta next to part of the Romanian navy, I got on a bus (shudder) and took a trip to the Danube Delta.  This is designated a UNESCO Wildlife Preserve and is actually quite nice.  However, before we get to the slideshow of the delta, I’d like to talk a little about Romanian History.  It’s something I knew next to nothing about, so I’ll assume you, dear reader, are on the same page.  If you’re just that smart, you can skip this next bit.

Lets start ancient.  The area, occupied by the Thracian people, was originally invaded by the Greeks but was later taken over by the Romans.  I’m glossing over the Greek bit because I want to get to the Romans because they had a particularly important influence over Romania.  The Romans brought to Romania administration, armies, and Latin.  It’s worth making a point about Latin because the countries that border Romania all speak Slavic Languages (actually, I’m not totally sure where Hungarian comes from, but it’s definitely not a Romance Language).  Romanian is actually a Romance Language.  I’ve even heard that it’s the closest living language to Latin, which I can see being true from signs and the 90% Latin derived composition of the language but that’s not something I have personally verified.  Another cool thing about the Roman occupation of Romania is that Catullus was stationed around this area Ovid was exiled here.  Yeah, it’s pretty cool.  I know Catullus was stationed on the Black Sea during his mandatory period of service from this poem, but I’m not totally sure where.  However, Ovid was definitely exiled here.  There’s a little murkiness as to why – some think it was because Ars Amatoria caused too much of a stir, others think it had something to do with the fact that he possibly fell in love with the Emperor’s wife – but Augustus definitely exiled him to Romania where he wrote a series of poems about how depressed he was about not being in Rome.  Eventually the Romans left because they felt that the area was not worth defending (their empire was crumbling and they didn’t want to spread themselves too thin) and the Barbarians started to attack.  Out of this tumult three kingdoms were formed perforce: Transylvania, Valajia, and Moldavia.  After fending off Barbarians, the Kingdoms of Romania had to contend with the Ottomans and the Austrian Empire.  Out of this conflict arose some of the most famous early kings of Romania like Michael the Old and the perennial favorite Vlad the Impaler.  Or Vlad the Devil.  Or Dracula.  Take your pick; he had a lot of names.  He got the first one for the way he dealt with Ottoman POWs (he decapitated them and impaled their heads along his borders) and the second he inherited from his dad (Vlad II had been a member of the Dragon Order whose uniform was a red lined black cape with a dragon rearing up on the hood.  In Romania dragons are synonymous with the Devil).  The third is a western invention.  Bram Stoker combined two folk stories from the area (one about werewolves from which he derived the vampire’s fears of garlic, silver, crosses, etc.; and the second about a princess who believed the secret of eternal life to be drinking the blood of virgins every night in addition to bathing in it when she felt insufficiently youthful) to create the quintessential vampire.  Stoker had never been to Romania and had never seen the castle that is now called Dracula’s Castle; a castle never actually inhabited by Vlad the Impaler by whom Dracula was inspired.  Still, it’s good for tourism.  Anyway, Romania was occupied in parts by both the Austrian Empire and the Ottoman Empire until WWI when they became an independently ruled nation.  They were a monarchy until a coup d’état brought upon the nation by Fascist Ion Antonescu.  He threw in his lot with Hitler and even went so far as to involve Romania in the ultimately disastrous Operation Barbarossa.  After WWII Romania fell under Soviet and later Romanian Communist control.  This led to the collectivization of the farmland and in 1965 the rise of Nicolae Ceauşescu.  Ceausescu had been a shoemaker but was helped to power by his friends in the Party.  Once in power he took control of the Securitate and killed everyone who had helped him into power.  And he was a scary dude.  Literally everything was rationed and it was rationed completely equally.  Case in point, the Securitate set up watchtowers along the Danube delta to make sure no fisherman took more than his fair share of fish while fishing.  He was that in control.  He also really screwed up the economy.  He exported nearly everything and imported nothing, which doesn’t sound so bad until you realize that that meant that there was nothing left for the Romanians.  Part of that was because of the Securitate.  When they came to ask about the harvest, the farmers would lie and say they had produced more than they had out of fear and the Securitate would report more than had been reported to them to make their dictator happy. Ceausescu would say that 1 out of 10 tons of wheat would be exported when really only 1 ton of wheat existed, leaving nothing for his people.  He was also into building big things.  The countryside is scattered with derelict Ceausescu Mega-Factories that are too big to do anything with.  They weren’t economically sound to begin with as they did not produce enough to pay off the investment used to build the thing and now no one wants them because they all have to be retrofitted, which is expensive, or torn down and rebuilt, which is more expensive.  He also built a canal bringing the Danube to Constantza, which at its present rate of bringing in 3 million per year will pay itself off in the next 300 years.  Yeah, not exactly economically sound.  In December 1989 the firing of a priest in Braşov caused the people to finally rise up against the dictatorship.  On the 25^th of December 1989 Ceausescu and his wife were executed by firing squad and the first democratic elections were the next year.  Yay!  Romania is now a relatively healthy eastern European democracy and a member of the EU as of 2007.

The Danube delta has 19 tourist preserves and more natural parks that only allow wildlife researchers to enter.  It has been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the revenues from tourism are used to preserve it to UNESCO standards.  The Delta is a huge center of shipping commerce as well as the home to about 350 families of Pelicans and another 100-ish families of Curly Pelicans making it home to the largest pelican colonies in the world.  Let the slide show begin!