The ‘Black’ Danube: Life and Poetry in the Forced Labour Camps of the Danube-Black Sea Canal

Abstract

Although the Danube-Black Sea Canal had been one of Ceaușescu’s pet projects, used by the
communist leader to enhance his image as a visionary prophet of the Golden Era of socialism,
the idea of a canal that would connect the Danube and the Black Sea may have been as old as
ancient Roman history. It is certainly along one of the lines of Trajan’s Wall (Valul lui Traian),
running along the Kara Su Valley, that the canal had been imagined, in the 19th century, by
various adventurers and travellers. In the 20th century, with the development of technology, the
idea turned into a project: in 1922 and 1923, two Romanian engineers (Jean Stoenescu Dunăre
and Aurel Bărglăzan) came up with very definite plans of how to create a fourth arm of the
Danube, which would help navigation by shortening the distance travelled by commercial ships
with about 400 kilometres.
The actual building of the Canal, initiated by Gheorghe Gheorghiu Dej at Stalin’s orders,
was less intended as a technological advancement and more as a pretext to exterminate the
interwar elite in the forced labour camps established along the Danube. Work at the Canal began
in 1949 and ended in 1953, after Stalin’s death. Though only 20 km had been completed out of
the intended 70 km, the legacy of the forced labour camps includes a large number of poems
written by the detainees, detailing the inhuman treatment they received and making up a
shattering testimonial of life in the Communist labour camps.
My paper intends to present and analyse a selection of such poems, showing how they
take up the myth of the exiled Ovid and mix it with symbols of Christian suffering. In most of
the poems, the colour that is associated with life in the labour camps is black: the blackness of
the Black Sea (the inhospitable Pontus, in Ovid’s poetry) is thus transferred onto the traditional
‘blue’ Danube.