Last spring on Ada Kaleh

It is very hard to say anything new of the sunken island of Ada Kaleh. Many memoirs, pictures, and literature can be found of this lost paradise, even on the internet, on many languages. In Hungarian, Romanian, German, English and Turkish as well. But very few films remained of it. This Romanian video shows the islands last spring, in two parts, before the complete island was flooded by the Iron Gate hydroelectric dam between Serbia (Yugoslavia and Romania)in 1968. It is not necessary to understand all that has been said by the narrator. The orchards of this lost world, the fort, the people, their houses, the peach trees, the unique rose-petal jam, the home-made cigars. The whole island, with its turkish inhabitants is gone. It is flooded by 30 meters (100 yards) of Danube water. The village and the fortress was torn town, taken on ships to rebuild almost everything on a somewhat downstream island, the Simian. This communist human experiment was unsuccessful, the turkish community dispersed as the petals of their peach orchard. Nothing remained.