Adakaleh, the Island that Became the Romanian Atlantis

Adakaleh, a small island on the Danube in central Europe, about 2 km in length, transported the visitor back to the time of the Ottoman Empire, a piece of land quite possibly taken from the imaginary One Thousand and One Arabian Nights stories we secretly read in high school.

The population spoke Turkish and delighted in growing roses, serving Turkish delights for dessert in the afternoon, and making unfiltered coffee in heated sand, so bitter that one’s numbed tongue failed to register the amount of caffeine poured from tiny copper pots, with enough grounds left to read one’s future in the images on the insides of the cup.

The tiny island survived wars of nations and fights against the Ottoman Empire, a no man’s land that no longer exists on any map. The entire island is now submerged in the Danube’s waters transformed into the hydro-power lake of the Iron Gates I and II (Portile de Fier).

At a depth of dozens of meters, a diver can find the fortress wall, narrow paved streets people no longer walk on, and lost homes submerged by a development agreed upon by the former Yugoslavia and Romania on which territories the Danube traversed. A few powerful men decided to drown a part of history in the name of progress.

In the twenty-first century, the Danube, the second largest river after the Volga, flows 1,775 miles from the Black Forest Mountains in Germany through (or borders) countries before it flows into the drainage basin by Black Sea – Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova, and Ukraine. The river was once a frontier of the Roman Empire.

Close to the Romanian town of Orsova, the island was a strategic point for centuries in the conflicts that Europe had experienced, particularly the advancement and occupations of the Ottoman Empire. Fortified by Austria in the 18^th century to keep the Ottoman Empire at bay, the island was eventually occupied by the Turks, fast becoming an enclave with a strange statute unlike any other.

The Treaty of Berlin in 1878 redesigned that map of Europe but forgot about Adakaleh Island and left it off the redrawn maps. Adkaleh, between Serbia and Romania, became an autonomous entity which had no taxation on goods. The Turkish locals fished, grew roses, made rose oil for perfumes, and planted tobacco. The Adakaleh cigarettes were famous all over Europe. The lack of taxation made them more desirable.

The 600-1,000 inhabitants had a strong Turkish culture and followed the call to prayer by the central mosque. Kings and famous people visited Adakaleh for its unique culture and place in Europe. It was an interesting ethnic bridge between Serbia and Romania.  

The island’s history entered an extinction path when the communist governments of Yugoslavia and Romania decided in the 1960s to build a hydropower station and a dam exactly where Adakaleh Island was located. Nobody asked the Turkish inhabitants what they wanted to do and there was no vote. People were told that progress requires sacrifices.

Locals were given two options, they could move to Turkey, their historical homeland, or move to the region of Dobrogea by the Black Sea where there was already a Turkish community also left behind from the many incursions of the Ottoman Empire into Romania. Romania had fought the Ottoman Empire for five hundred years as a crossing portal to the rest of Europe.

A tomb and a few fortress walls were moved to Simian Island for historical reasons. Old people on the island lost everything they had ever known. In the 1970s, when the dam was completed, the deep and placid lake bore no trace of the formerly thriving island. The soul of the community, with all the homes and narrow streets, was sunk in the dam’s deep waters.

Adakaleh Island became a Romanian Atlantis deep beneath the waters of the Iron Gates I and II.