Danube-Black Sea Canal

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Danube in blue, the Canal in red

Map of the forced labour camps at the Canal

A barge on the Danube-Black Sea Canal

The Danube-Black Sea Canal is a canal in Romania which runs from Cernavodă on the Danube to Agigea (southern arm) and Năvodari (northern arm) on the Black Sea. It is an important part of the European canal system that links the North Sea to the Black Sea.

1 Statistics
2 Construction
3 Footnotes and References
4 External links

[edit] Statistics

Opened in 1984, the 64 km canal reduces the distance by boat from Constanţa to Cernavodă by 400 km. The canal has a width of 60 metres and a depth of 7 metres. The northern arm has a length of 26.6 km, width of 50 m and a depth of 5.5 metres.

[edit] Construction

The canal took over nine years to construct; 300 million m³ of soil was excavated, by hand, by over 30,000 people. 4.2 million m³ of reinforced concrete were used in the construction.

The earliest plans for building this canal were created in 1839. Following the building of a railway connection in 1860, goods were easily and inexpensively transported from Constanţa by railroad, so plans for a canal were abandoned. In 1927, the Romanian engineer Jean Stoenescu drafted a new set of plans. Because of the Great Depression, World War II, and political turmoil in Romania, construction did not begin until 1949.

The decision to build the Danube-Black Sea Canal was made on May 25, 1949 by the Politburo of the Romanian Workers' Party. Prison camps sprang up all along the projected canal route in the summer of 1949 and were quickly filled with political prisoners brought from jails from throughout the country. These first arrivals were soon joined by newly arrested people who were sent to the canal in ever increasing numbers. By 1950 the labor camps were filled to capacity; over 40,000 detainees were held in its camps, along with another 20,000 so-called "volunteer workers"^[1]. New satellite camps were set up around the existing ones in order to accommodate the continually growing mass of prisoners. Estimates of their numbers vary but it is generally accepted that well over 100,000 prisoners performed forced labor on the canal^[2]. The labor force was made up of "reactionary elements", the majority of whom had been "administratively arrested", without trial, for terms varying between 12 and 60 months^[1]. The canal was called "a graveyard of the Romanian bourgeoisie" by the Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej regime^[1]. It is estimated that over 200,000 laborers died from 1949 to 1953 working on the project, from exposure, disease, unsafe equipment, malnutrition, accidents, consumption, over-work, and a myriad of other ways^[3]. As such, it became known as the Death Canal (Canalul Morţii in Romanian).

In July 1953, the project came to a halt, all work being suspended for another 23 years. The canal camps remained in existence for another year, with no change in the treatment of the prisoners except that they were now doing forced labor on other work sites in Dobruja. Their number, however, declined as they were gradually released or transferred to prisons in other parts of the country. The canal camps were closed in mid-1954.

In 1976, the project was restarted by Nicolae Ceauşescu. The southern arm was finished in 1984, with the northern arm being finished in 1987.

The cost of building the canal is estimated to be around $2 billion, and was supposed to be recovered in 50 years. However, nowadays it has a yearly profit of only a little over €3 million.