The ancient city of Tomis (Tomoi, modern Constanţa, in the Dobruja region of Romania) was founded as a Greek colony, on a peninsula that juts into the Black Sea some 80 km to the south of the Danube delta.
Each town has its own history, own pattern and rhythm of life. There is no other town in Romania so worth visiting. Constanta of today sits on the tomb of the old town, Tomis. One of the legends of this historic place says that the beautiful Medea, the princess of Colchis (nowadays Georgia), flees from her parents, taking with her, the little brother, Absirt. Offended by her deed, Aeetes, her father follows her ship and almost catch it when Medea, frightened, kills her brother, cuts up his body and scatters the parts on the sea to delay him and escape from his anger. The unhappy parent stops his ship every time he sees parts of his beloved son. Overwhelming with all the pieces, Aeetes moors the boat to bury the son. This shore, the city that rose then here, has been called Tomis which in Greek language means piece.
Many faces have been seen in this little corner of the world, on the western coast of the Black Sea. At the beginning, the Phoenicians settled down here, the ones who dominated trade in the first millennium B.C. and those who usually get credit for the first alphabet which became the basis of the Roman alphabet, the one we use today. Later, the Greeks came, followed by Barbarians, all kind of and altogether looking for the „golden fleece” Lives over lives have settled down on this coast in three thousand years, and storms after storms have haunted and shook their settlements from foundation.
Ancient inscriptions, ruins of the houses, temples and baths that were digging beneath the coast show and demonstrate the flourishing state that Tomis had it once. A strong and civilised life sprouted here, and who knows where it would have been today if it was left alone. And nothing more, the Barbarian streams started to flow, flooding and devastating, destroying the Roman reinforcements, placing the fortress into the ground and transforming centuries of work of so many nations into dust. From the ruins of Tomis, the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great rose Constanta, to whom later the Genovese sailors gave it for a while, the old glamour and the commercial significance. Then Constanta fell under the Turkish rule; the pier and the dams which guarded the town were left to time. The beautiful building of the port have been sacked, the city’s life began to yearn – a deeply and upsetting sleep, like a slavery spread over the entire Dobruja. Waves of the sea mourned the ending of a world.
