What the Iron Gates Cost
A dam agreed in 1963 made the most dangerous stretch of the Danube navigable and produced about 2,100 megawatts, and it drowned an inhabited Turkish island to do it. The engineers cut a Roman inscription out of the cliff and raised it above the new water line; they did not save the island.
The Danube at Orșova is wide, flat and slow, and it looks like a lake because it is one. Somewhere under it, thirty-odd metres down, is an island not quite two kilometres long with an eighteenth-century fortress on it, a bazaar, a mosque, a cemetery and the foundations of about a hundred houses. It was called Ada Kaleh, most of the people who lived there spoke Turkish, and it was still inhabited in 1968.
The reservoir behind the Iron Gates dam covered it in 1970. That fact usually gets told as a straightforward act of communist vandalism, which is the wrong shape for it. The case for the dam was strong, the gorge it flooded had killed people for centuries, and the decision was taken jointly by two governments that agreed on almost nothing else. What is worth arguing about is not whether the dam should have been built. It is what the two states chose to carry out of the valley before the water came, and what they left.
The most dangerous water in Europe
Before 1972 the Iron Gates were not a metaphor. For the last few kilometres of the gorge the Danube ran over a reef of rock in a series of rapids, dropping fast, with a current that ordinary steam engines could not push a loaded vessel through. From the 1890s ships went up through the Sip channel, blasted along the Serbian bank, and even then they were hauled against the current by locomotives running on a towpath. The gorge was the reason the Danube functioned as two rivers rather than one, and it was why Vienna and the Black Sea were not really connected by water.
What the dam bought
Romania and Yugoslavia signed the agreement in 1963, started work in 1964, and inaugurated the plant on 16 May 1972. It generates about 2,100 megawatts, divided evenly, and it remains the largest dam on the Danube. It raised the water roughly 35 metres, which drowned the rapids and put a two-chamber lock on each bank in their place. A river that had needed locomotive haulage now takes barge convoys straight through. Both banks got power, both got navigation, and the border ran along the crest of the dam.
Nobody has to be a villain for this to hurt. Two governments did the arithmetic, and the arithmetic was right, and the island was on the wrong side of it.
The island that was in nobody's treaty
Ada Kaleh had been an Ottoman garrison and then an administrative accident. The Treaty of Berlin in 1878 redrew the region and simply omitted it, so the island stayed nominally Ottoman while Austria-Hungary occupied it. Romania took it in 1913, and Turkey formally signed it over only in the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. Through all of that it kept a customs exemption, which is why Romanians in the interwar years went there for tobacco, coffee and Turkish delight, and why the last generation of islanders made a living selling those things to day-trippers off the Orșova boat.
The relocation that was never finished
The plan was not demolition. The fortress was to be taken apart, numbered and rebuilt on Șimian island downstream, near Drobeta-Turnu Severin, with the bazaar and the mosque, as a new Ada Kaleh. Stone was barged down from 1968. Then the money ran out, or the interest did, and the rebuilding stopped at a fragment of wall. Numbered masonry is still lying on Șimian in the grass, and the island the state promised was never made.
The residents scattered. Some went to Turkey, some to the Dobrogea villages near the coast, some into the new blocks at Orșova, whose own old town was demolished and rebuilt higher up the slope in the same operation. The carpet from the island mosque, a gift from Sultan Abdul Hamid II, ended up in the Carol I mosque in Constanța, which is where it still is: the largest surviving object from a place that no longer has a location.
What was worth lifting
The clearest statement of the priorities is on the Serbian bank, where the Tabula Traiana — the Roman inscription put up in AD 100 to mark the road cut into the gorge wall — was cut out of the cliff in 1969 and raised about twenty metres so the reservoir would not reach it. It is still legible from a boat. Moving a stone plaque up a cliff face is not a trivial piece of engineering, and it was done, deliberately, by the same programme that could not finish reassembling a town. You can put the two halves of that decision together in a day: the afternoon boat from Orșova runs upstream past the plaque and over the drowned island, and a good skipper will cut the engine above the site, which is as close as anyone gets without diving gear. The Iron Gates museum at Drobeta-Turnu Severin has the survey drawings, the photographs of the last summer and a model of the island. Șimian takes a local boat and half a morning.