Constanța

In 1411, this prize fell to the expanding Ottoman Empire, beginning nearly five centuries of rule that transformed the city's character. Under the Ottomans, Constanța quieted into what nineteenth-century observers would later describe as a "poor Turkish fishing village" of barely five thousand souls. But the late nineteenth century brought a violent geopolitical realignment. Following the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878, the Treaty of Berlin awarded Northern Dobruja, including Constanța, to the newly independent Kingdom of Romania. The Romanians inherited a sleepy, multicultural town of Turks, Tatars, Greeks, and Bulgarians, but they possessed grand ambitions. King Carol I envisioned Constanța as Romania’s gateway to the world. In 1895, the construction of the spectacular King Carol I Bridge across the Danube at Cernavodă linked the port directly to Bucharest by rail. Almost overnight, Constanța became a booming commercial hub. The city exported vast torrents of Romanian grain and petroleum to Western Europe, while importing coal, machinery, and textiles. To match this economic vitality, the state constructed the grand Carol I Mosque (now the Grand Mosque of Constanța) in 1910 to honor the city’s Muslim population, alongside the soaring Orthodox Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul.

This era of optimism was captured in glass and concrete on the city’s rocky shoreline. In 1910, the Romanian crown commissioned the Constanța Casino. Designed by architects Daniel Renard and Petre Antonescu, this grand, extravagant Art Nouveau masterpiece seemed to rise directly out of the waves of the Black Sea. Its shell-shaped windows, opulent grand staircases, and gaming tables attracted the high society of Belle Époque Europe. Yet this glittering age was soon shattered by the twentieth century’s world wars. During World War I, the city was occupied by the Central Powers in October 1916. In a bizarre moment of nationalist friction, occupying Bulgarian troops dismantled the bronze statue of Ovid that had been erected in the central square in 1887; German forces, perhaps feeling a stronger connection to classical humanism, later insisted on its reinstatement. Though the interwar period saw Constanța recover to handle over half of Romania’s national exports, World War II brought further devastation. As Romania aligned with the Axis powers, the port became a prime target for Allied bombing. While the historic old town remained largely intact, the docks and shipping facilities were reduced to rubble, taking nearly a decade to rebuild under the postwar Communist regime.

Today, Constanța is a complex, layered metropolis of over 260,000 people, where ancient ruins and industrial grit exist side-by-side. The city's modern port, sprawling over nearly forty square kilometers, is the largest on the Black Sea and one of the largest in Europe, connected to the heart of the continent via the Danube-Black Sea Canal. Underneath this vast industrial apparatus lies the ancient Greek and Roman city, making systematic archaeological excavation near impossible, though tantalizing fragments occasionally emerge. During the construction of the railway in the nineteenth century, workers stumbled upon the remains of a massive Roman port building containing one of the longest preserved mosaic pavements in the world. Meanwhile, on the shoreline, the great Art Nouveau Casino stood for decades as a ghostly, derelict shell—a monument to a vanished European elite—until a major restoration project finally began to rescue its faded grandeur in 2021. Recent history has once again thrust this ancient harbor into global prominence; the blockades of Ukrainian ports following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine turned Constanța into a critical lifeline, the primary conduit for transporting grain from the fertile plains of Eastern Europe to a hungry world. In this latest chapter of its long life, the city remains what it has always been: a vital bridge between the deep interior of the continent and the vast, unpredictable waters of the wider world.