page_title: Ada Kaleh
hierarchical_section_title: Ada Kaleh
caption_attribution_description: English: Island of Ada Kaleh toward the end of the 19th century
context_page_description: Ada Kaleh was a small island on the Danube in what is modern Romania, populated mostly by Turks of Romania, that was submerged during the construction of the Iron Gates hydroelectric plant in 1970. The island was about 3 km downstream from Orșova and was less than two kilometers long and approximately half a kilometer wide.
  The isle of Ada Kaleh is probably the most evocative victim of the Iron Gate dam's construction. Once an Ottoman Turkish exclave that changed hands multiple times in the 18th and 19th centuries, it had a mosque and numerous twisting alleys, and was known as a free port and a smuggler's nest. The existence of Ada Kaleh was overlooked at the 1878 Congress of Berlin peace talks surrounding the Russo-Turkish War and the Romanian War of Independence, which allowed it to remain a de jure possession of the Ottoman Sultan until 1923.
context_section_description: Ada Kaleh ([ˈada kaˈle] from Turkish: Adakale meaning "Island Fortress", Hungarian: Újorsova or Ada Kaleh, Serbian and Bulgarian: Адакале / Adakale) was a small island on the Danube in what is modern Romania, populated mostly by Turks of Romania, that was submerged during the construction of the Iron Gates hydroelectric plant in 1970. The island was about 3 km downstream from Orșova and was less than two kilometers long and approximately half a kilometer wide (1.75 x 0.4–0.5 km).
  The isle of Ada Kaleh is probably the most evocative victim of the Iron Gate dam's construction. Once an Ottoman Turkish exclave that changed hands multiple times in the 18th and 19th centuries, it had a mosque and numerous twisting alleys, and was known as a free port and a smuggler's nest.  The existence of Ada Kaleh was overlooked at the 1878 Congress of Berlin peace talks surrounding the Russo-Turkish War and the Romanian War of Independence, which allowed it to remain a de jure possession of the Ottoman Sultan until 1923.
caption: A photo of Ada Kaleh.
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