Sulina International Cemetery

Sulina International Cemetery, called the "cemetery complex" by the town hall, lies on Europolis Street (the continuation of Nicolae Bălcescu Street) at the eastern edge of the town of Sulina, about 1 km from the centre, on the way to the beach. The complex brings together the Orthodox cemetery, the Old Believer (Lipovan) cemetery, the cemetery of the Western churches (Catholic and Protestant), the Muslim cemetery and the Jewish cemetery. Within it one can also distinguish the groups of graves of British sailors and of members of the European Commission of the Danube. The cemetery took shape in the mid-19th century, when Sulina became the technical base of the European Commission of the Danube (CED), set up in 1856, and a port with a very mixed population: Greeks, Romanians, Lipovan Russians, Turks, Armenians, Jews, Italians and others. CED officials, engineers, sailors, shipyard workers and townspeople are buried here. Engineer Petre Covacef, who wrote the book "The Living Cemetery of Sulina", described it as "a mixture of religions, peoples, languages written on crosses, customs and trades", the resting place of those who worked on the largest hydraulic engineering project in 19th-century Europe. Visitors can see funerary monuments in stone and wrought iron, with inscriptions in several languages and alphabets, from Orthodox crosses and British sailors' monuments to Muslim gravestones, as well as the cemetery chapel. Sulina can only be reached by water, on passenger ships from Tulcea; from the landing stage the cemetery is about a 15-minute walk east, on the road that continues to the beach. An ARBDD access permit is required for the Delta area. The ensemble is listed in the List of Historic Monuments, category A (national value), with five entries dated to the mid-19th century: the Cemetery of the European Commission of the Danube (TL-IV-s-A-06044), the Orthodox cemetery (TL-IV-s-A-06045), the Muslim cemetery (TL-IV-s-A-06046), the Catholic cemetery (TL-IV-s-A-06047) and the Jewish cemetery (TL-IV-s-A-06048). The town lies within the Danube Delta Biosphere Reserve. Did you know that the cemetery also holds the grave of a pirate? The gravestone of the Greek Ghiorghios Kontoguris, dated 1871, bears a skull and crossbones. Legend says he lured ships towards the shore by tying lanterns to the horns of cattle and that he buried his treasure in the port of Sulina; to find it, you would have to pour water on his gravestone at sunrise.