Mangalia Mosque

Mangalia Mosque is the oldest mosque in Romania, being built in 1575 by Esmahan, the daughter of Ottoman sultan Selim II. Located in Mangalia, Constanţa County, it serves a community of 800 Muslim families, most of them of Turkish and Tatar ethnicity.


The seaside town of Mangalia is home to an important landmark left behind by Ottoman rule over the region, to wit the Esmahan Sultan Mosque, built in 1575. Esma Han, daughter of Sultan Selim II and wife of Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, was very fond of the region, and decreed that a mosque be built where Mangalia lies today. That place of worship was officially inaugurated in 1590, and is today surrounded by a 300 year-old cemetery among can be identified architectural fragments from buildings from ancient Greek colony of Callatis. Turkish dignitaries were buried here, and tombstones bear inscriptions in Old Arabic.


The mosque is a veritable museum. It was built in the Moorish style, using carved stone and bricks from an old Roman tomb. It differs from other Muslim places of worship in Dobruja (Dobrogea) in that the front entrance is surrounded by a veranda. The building stands 12 meters tall, and has 85 cm thick walls. It is relatively small by the usual mosque standards.


Mangalia Mosque is a historical monument. In the 1990s, local authorities renovated the building and surrounded it with a tall fence. The mosque was again renovated in 2008, with financial aid from a generous donation of 1 million euros made by a Turkish businessman. The roof was replaced, and the minaret was consolidated. The interior walls and the fountain in the yard were renovated. Its waters are once again used in the sacred ritual of washing the dead. The oldest mosque in Romania is once again a welcoming venue for believers and tourists alike.

Turks in Romania

The Turks (Romanian: Turci) are an ethnic minority in Romania, numbering 32,596 people according to the 2002 census and hence making up 0.2% of the total population. The majority of Turks live in the historical region of Northern Dobruja (Turkish: Dobruca), particularly in Constanţa County, where they number 24,246 and make up 3.4% of the population, Tulcea County with 3,334 (1.3%) and Bucharest with 2,473 (0.1%). As an officially-recognised ethnic minority, Turks have one seat reserved for them in the Romanian Chamber of Deputies.


As the entire Balkan Peninsula become an integral part of the emerging Ottoman Empire (a process which concluded with the fall of Constantinople to Sultan Mehmed II in 1453), Wallachia became engaged in frequent confrontations and, in the final years of Mircea the Elder's reign, became an Ottoman subject. In the two Danubian Principalities, Ottoman suzerainty had an overall reduced impact on the local population, and the impact of Islam was itself much reduced. Wallachia and Moldavia enjoyed a large degree of autonomy, and their history was punctuated by episodes of revolt and momentary independence. After 1417, when Ottoman domination over Wallachia first became effective, the towns of Turnu and Giurgiu were annexed as kazas, a rule enforced until the Treaty of Adrianople in 1829 (the status was briefly extended to Brăila in 1542). Alongside Dobruja, a part of present-day Romania under direct Ottoman rule in 1551-1718 was the Eyalet of Temeşvar (the Banat region of western Romania), which extended as far as Arad (1551-1699) and Oradea (1661-1699). The few thousand Muslims settled there were, however, driven out by Habsburg conquest. The presence of Muslims in the two Danubian Principalities was also attested, centering on Turkish traders and small communities of Muslim Roma. It is also attested that, during later Phanariote rules and the frequent Russo-Turkish Wars, Ottoman troops were stationed on Wallachia's territory.


Islam in Romania is followed by only 0.3 percent of population, but has 700 years of tradition in Northern Dobruja, a region on the Black Sea coast which was part of the Ottoman Empire for almost five centuries (ca. 1420-1878). According to tradition, Islam was first established locally around Sufi leader Sari Saltik during the Byzantine epoch. The Islamic presence in Northern Dobruja was expanded by Ottoman overseeing and successive immigration, but has been in steady decline since the late 19th century. After Northern Dobruja became part of Romania following the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878, the community preserved its self-determining status. This changed during the communist regime, when Romanian Muslims were subject to a measure of supervision by the state, but the group again emancipated itself after the Romanian Revolution of 1989. Its interests are represented by the Muftiyat (Muftiyatul Cultului Musulman din România), which was created as the reunion of two separate such institutions. The Islamic religion is one of the 16 rites awarded state recognition.

Tatars in Romania

Tatars (Romanian: Tătari) were present on the territory of today's Romania since the 13th century. According to the 2002 census, 24,000 people declared their nationality as Tatar, most of them being Crimean Tatars living in Constanţa County. They are the main factor of Islam in Romania.


The Tatars first reached the mouths of the Danube in the mid-13th century at the height of power of the Golden Horde. In 1241, under the leadership of Kadan, the Tatars crossed the Danube, conquering and devastating the region. The region was probably not under the direct rule of the Horde, but rather, a vassal of the Bakhchisaray Khan. It is known from Arab sources that at the end of the 13th century and the beginning of the 14th century that descendants of the Nogai Horde settled in Isaccea. Another Arab scholar, Ibn Battuta, who passed through the region in 1330-1331, talks about Baba Saltuk (Babadag) as the southernmost town of the Tatars. The Golden Horde began to lose its influence after the wars of 1352-1359 and at the time, a Tatar warlord, Demetrius is noted defending the cities of the Mouths of the Danube. Toward the end of the 16th century, about 30,000 Nogai Tatars from the Budjak were brought to Dobruja. Nogai Tatars consider themselves as descended of the people of the Golden Horde and they take their name from Nogai Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan.


Crimean Tatars were brought to Dobruja by the Ottomans following the increasing power of the Russians in the region and its annexation of Crimea in 1783. After the Russian annexation of Crimea in 1783, Crimean Tatars began emigrating to the Ottoman coastal provinces of Dobruja (today divided between Romania and Bulgaria). However, after the independence of Romania in 1877-1878, between 80,000 and 100,000 Crimean Tatars moved to Anatolia, a migration which continued afterward. As such, the number of Tatars in Northern Dobruja decreased from 21% in 1880 to 5.6% in 1912. In 2002, they formed 2.4% of the population of this region. The Nogai component of the Tatar population are not separately enumerated in Romanian censuses. Most have emigrated to Turkey but it is estimated that a few thousand Nogais still live in Dobruja, notably in the town of Mihail Kogălniceanu (Karamurat) and villages of Lumina (Kocali), Valea Dacilor (Hendekkarakuyusu) and Cobadin (Kubadin).


Between 1947-1957 Tatar schools began operating in Romania and in 1955 a special alphabet was created for the Tatar community. In 1990 the Democratic Union of Muslim Tatar-Turks was established. Currently Romania respects the minority rights of Tatars and does not follow any policy of Romanianization.

Basarabi Cave Complex

Basarabi Cave Complex is a medieval cave complex located in the town of Basarabi, Constanţa County, Romania.


The complex of cave monuments in Basarabi was discovered in 1957 during the limestone quarry activities. The complex used from the second half of the 9th to the half of the 11th century consists of a number of galleries, dwellings, crypts, tombs, six chapels and a quarry from the same epoch, where limestone was cut out. All the composing elements of the architectural complex are dug into the chalky limestone hill at different levels, into the vertical walls of the ancient quarry.


The main conclusions regarding the location, the role and the significance of the cave monuments were already drawn, though studies about them are not yet finished. Dobruja was under Byzantine Empire rule during those centuries, rule again established at the mouth of the Danube after a short period of its political and military decline from the beginning of the 7th cent. A representative elements series of this archaeological complex is specific for the Dobrujan Romanian population. The limestone deposit exploiting system in open-air scales and terraces, used since ancient times in Roman quarries (including Dobruja) was unknown to migrant populations. Many of the excavated tombs were built according to older, Roman traditions. Two types represent ceramics: the local, Dridu type and the imported Byzantine one, inheriting older, Greek and Roman traditions. Regarding building conceptions, religious frameworks, with apses, central and side naves, though little, keep exactly the plan of Roman-Byzantine basilicas (including those in Dobruja) from the 4th-6th cent. A.D. The entire ensemble, with its rich figurative and symbolic decoration, represents an especially important document for our history, until now unique in eastern parts of Europe.


Decoration consists of human figures, orants, riders, animals, birds, laic and religious symbols etc. A large interest group is represented by fantastic figures like monsters and dragons. These ones, together with also on the walls represented halberds are of northern, Viking origin, a fact also confirmed by anthropological analysis of two skeletons. The same northern origin, accepted by all scientists, is proven by the image of a Viking ship. Beside other elements excavated from the 10th-11th centuries in Dinogetia (Tulcea County), specific also to Vikings, these discoveries were linked to the trade route between Scandinavian areas and Constantinople, known under the name “the route from the Varegs (= Vikings) to the Greek”.


A special attention must be given to the large number of inscriptions carved into the walls, using the Greek, proto-Glagolitic, Glagolitic alphabet and Runic signs. It is proven, that Greek, proto-Glagolitic and Glagolitic alphabets were used by a Romanic population. Recently even a number of Romanian language inscriptions were deciphered, containing specific religious idioms. The language of the Asiatic Runes and mixed inscriptions is still unknown. It may be Proto-Bulgarian, as suggested by a lot of Bulgarian scholars, or Turanic, as implied by Romanian scholars. It is said that the names included are of Romanian (Latin) origin, such as "Petre" and even the possibly Nordic "Rainpilpe".


After the cave complex was discovered, between 1957 and 1962 first protection measures were taken, with a wooden structure covering and protecting it against rain and wind, but this didn't much lower temperature differences. Between 1971 and 1974 final preservation and conservation works took place, especially in the area of the cave churches and galleries. But only three protection-building segments of seven were completed, covering a surface of 924 m². In 1975 these works were stopped as a result of financial difficulties. In 1981 local authorities and an architecture institute elaborated a project to protect segments 4 to 7 of the complex. The main functional elements were to be covered by a building to assure its protection and museum functionality, with platforms for visitors and exhibition spaces, consolidation of the chalky limestone slope, reconstitution of original elements in special rooms and inside the galleries.