Sulina and surrounding

Sulina is a small city at the mouth of Danube, a modest rural settlement head to small self-sufficient villages like Sfantu Gheorghe and Mila 23.
Opening both to Danube and to the Black Sea, Sulina is today a marginalized locality, only accessible by water.
For more than a century, Sulina was the headquarters of the European Commission of Danube (CED). Between 1856 and 1939, Sulina turns into “the most cosmopolite city in the country”, a fashionable resort and a flourishing porto franco of over 10.000 inhabitants with about 20 different ethnic groups and several religious confessions.
Beside its unique multicultural history, Sulina is also a post-socialist city, with a former prosperous local industry during communism.
Since 1989, after the dissolution of the communist regime, most of the local industry has dismantled; people have lost their jobs, the unemployment rate become one of the biggest in the country, and the city continued to slowly destroy itself. Sulina lost its centripetal force of attraction, as “the city” of the region and became the place everyone wanted to leave behind. Now it shares the decaying fate of many of the small cities of Romania.
Most of the residents are Romanians, Ukrainians or Lipoveans, who came to Sulina, “to the city”, from neighbouring villages.
The Ukrainians are descendants of the Hahols, Ukrainian soldiers from Zaporozhe who took refuge in the Danube Delta after their defeat in 1775 by the army of Catherine II the Great.
The Lipoveans, also known as Old Believers, emigrated from Russia over 200 years ago as dissenters from the mainline of the Russian Orthodox Church. They have maintained strong religious traditions that predate the reforms undertaken during the reign of Patriarch Nikon.
The urban landscape of Sulina, an architectural blend of XIX century buildings, interwar houses, modern terraces and monotonous blocks of flats, is the living proof of its fascinating history. Passing from street 1 to the other five parallel streets of the city entails a unique gradual translation from urban to rural, towards the margins of the city nature takes over, cows are walking the streets and small dogs sit dormant on the sidewalks, while silence reigns supreme. 
Tim Edensor argues “In a conventional reading of the urban landscape, dereliction and ruin is a sign of waste and for local politicians and entrepreneurs, tends to provide stark evidence of an area’s lack, that simultaneously signifies a vanished prosperity and by contrast, an uncertain future”.