Overcoming the Iron Gates: Austrian Transport and River Regulation on the Lower Danube, 1830s–1840s

Abstract

This article deals with early efforts to facilitate steam navigation between Vienna and Constantinople along the Danube. In addition to analyzing the complex negotiation processes that enabled the first regulation project at the so-called Iron Gates, a narrow gorge situated at the Austrian-Ottoman border, it assesses ways in which the new shipping connection transformed the cultural and spatial perceptions of travelers. The article argues that even though the plan for making the Iron Gates navigable was set out on the drawing boards of engineers and in the cabinets in Pest and Vienna, local circumstances changed its practical implementation in a number of important ways. The success of this major engineering operation relied on close cooperation among hydrological experts, state representatives, and entrepreneurs, all of whom had different stakes in the project but still shared a common interest. Establishing a shipping connection to the Black Sea along the Danube was thus the result of an alignment of interests among Hungarian, Viennese, and local Ottoman authorities; a careful match between theoretical knowledge and practical engineering work; and, last but not least, the surmounting of a mental separation between “Orient” and “Occident.”

The Galician Canal—An unrealized project that changed the rivers in the northern part of the Carpathians

“…Major river regulation work on the Danube, facilitating navigation, was also carried out at the gorge of The Iron Gates. The work was completed in 1896 (Gatejel, 2016).…”

The Bulgarian connection: the Young Turks in exile and the making of radicalism in Ottoman Europe, 1895–1897

“…In the decades that followed, Russian conquest of the northern rim of the Black Sea – though challenged on a number of occasions by the Ottomans – soon led to the establishment of what would become notable port cities, such as Odessa, Kherson, and Sevastopol that, thanks to Russian reduction of tariffs and liberal economic policies, began to connect the grain-growing sectors of the Black Sea with the vectors of European trade (Ardeleanu 2014). While the constant warfare stalled the full integration of the region to the world economy, the signing of the Treaty of Adrianople in 1829, which ended the cycles of Russo-Ottoman wars, brought the principalities of Wallachia and Moldovia under the Russian protectorate, making the Danube no longer an inland Ottoman waterway, but rather one open for international navigation and trade (Gatejel 2016, 166).…”