Sulina Lighthouse of the European Commission of the Danube
[adsense]The building of this lighthouse was decided on 2 November 1865 at Galati, after the establishment of the European Commission of the Danube.
The plans and the building of this objective were realized by the English engineers Ch. Hartley and M. Engelhardt who also helped create the plans of the digging and maintenance of the Sulina branch of the Danube.
The lighthouse was built in two stages and was finalized in 1870, being the property of the European Commission of the Danube.
The lighthouse is located in the middle of the city, somewhere in the back of the European Commission Palace, on the main road to the beach. In total, there are three lighthouses in Sulina.
[adsense]This one is often mistaken for the old Sulina observer lighthouse, which is further out of the city, accessible by boat or by foot using the long dike on the left side of the Danube. I hope I managed to clear this misconception, because visitors often leave this place with a wrong idea.
I spoke to an old man who’s a former director of the “Lower Danube Administration of Galati” and he explained that while the observer lighthouse helped solve the problem of finding the entrance to the Danube, ships would still get stranded on the shores of the channel given the lack of consolidations at the time, and would usully fall prey to the pirates that roamed free in this area.
The building of the European Comission Lighthouse solved this new issue by helping ships stay on course by tracing an imaginary line between the two powerful lighthouses.
Between 1856 and 1921, the headquarters of the European Commission of the Danube were at Sulina, in the E.C.D. Palace on the I St No.202, being relocated after that to Orsova.
When the European Comission was dissolved, the lighthouse entered the patrimony of the Lower Danube Administration of Galati, and it later was given in administration to the “Danube Delta” Museum in Tulcea.
From here, it is taken by the Ministry of culture in 1991 and is now under the administration of the National Office for the Protection of Historical Monuments.
