Guided Tours in the Danube Delta with Dragos OLARU

You will see that in contrast to the crowded Black Sea beaches along Romania's east coast, the waterlogged Danube Delta is a place set apart from the rest of the country where life has hardly changed for centuries and where boats are they only way to reach many settlements. During spring and autumn, especially, hundreds of species of birds from all over the Old World migrate through this region or come to breed. Drifting through the marshes of the Danube Delta is a genuine primeval adventure. Birds screech, honk, howl and cuckoo. Frogs croak and grunt. Mosquitoes bite. Trees and dense brush seem to grow right out of the water. There's little civilization, exept for poor, primitive fishing villages scattered deep in the thick of the wilderness maze. Man was present in the Danube Delta as far back as in antiquity, as attested by archeological discoveries at Chilia Veche and the Letea field. Lasting settlements are attested only from the XI - XII centuries and only at Chilia Veche and outside the Danube Delta, on the northern Dobrudja continental extremity. The Venetian foreign trading post from Chilia, which is very close to the sea, according to commercial documents kept at the Libreria Marciana from Venice. The European Comission of the Danube map from 1870 specifies 14 villages inside the delta and Sulina town. Most of the villages have Russian or Ukrainian names. An unusual sensation was made about the old character of this town, starting from the name Sollina that appears at the mouth of the Sulina branch, on Constantin VII - th Porphirogeneth map in 950. The development of Sulina town started together with the setting up of the CED headquarters and at the same time with the initiatives of the sailing insurance actions on the branch. Shortly, the small settlement of huts became a restless free-port cosmopolitan town. At present, the town is going through a difficult economic period - which, nevertheless has not led to a degradation of life standards, the town being clean and people hoping for a better future. In 1992 the population of the Danube Delta was 15.950 inhabitants