During World War II, Germans mined and destroyed the port almost completely in 1944 while retreating. Reconstruction started in 1950, and the construction for a large port started four years later. The first phase was completed in 1965. The second phase that had in its plan an annual turnover of cca 5 million tons of cargo was almost completed, when the catastrophic earthquake struck in 1979, destroying more than half of its modern port facilities.