Old Lighthouse Museum in Sulina

The Old Lighthouse Museum is housed in the lighthouse of the European Commission of the Danube (ECD), at 43 Strada a II-a in Sulina, at the end of the Sulina branch of the Danube, in the Danube Delta. It is run by the "Gavrilă Simion" Eco-Museum Research Institute of Tulcea (ICEM). Sulina cannot be reached by road, only by water, on passenger ships from Tulcea. The lighthouse is a truncated-cone brick structure, 17.34 m high, with a spiral metal staircase lit by three round windows and a cylindrical copper-sheet lantern. The List of Historic Monuments dates it to 1870, and the museum's entry in the Museum Guide (National Heritage Institute) states that it was built by the European Commission of the Danube in 1869-1870, to a design attributed to M. Engelhardt and adopted under the direction of the engineer Sir Charles A. Hartley. Other sources link the lighthouse to an older Ottoman or Russian lighthouse of the early 19th century. Oil lamps were used at first, replaced by electric lighting in 1910-1911. After the ECD was dissolved in 1938, the lighthouse passed to the Lower Danube River Administration, was extinguished in 1986 and replaced by the new lighthouse, then restored by the Ministry of Culture and turned into a museum. Since 2003 it has been run by ICEM Tulcea. Between 2019 and 2022 it was closed for a new rehabilitation, funded through Tulcea County Council. The ground floor has two exhibition rooms: one dedicated to the European Commission of the Danube, the international body that turned Sulina from a fishing village into a port town, and one dedicated to the writer Jean Bart (Eugeniu P. Botez), maritime commissioner in Sulina in the early 20th century, with his furniture and family photographs. There is also a collection of weapons from the 18th to 20th centuries, medals, documents, maps and photographs about the work of the ECD, and ICEM also presents the conductor George Georgescu, who was born in Sulina. Around the lighthouse, the seven rooms once used as staff housing and stores are now museum annexes, around an inner courtyard. Opening hours and prices are on the ICEM website. The European Danube Commission Lighthouse is a category A historic monument, LMI code TL-II-m-A-06023 (dated 1870). Sulina lies in the Danube Delta Biosphere Reserve, a UNESCO site and a Ramsar wetland. Did you know that the lighthouse was built close to where the Danube flowed into the sea, but today stands about 1.5 km from the shore? Over time the land advanced into the sea and the coastline moved, so the old lighthouse ended up in the middle of the town.