Ada Kaleh: The Island Europe Forgot

An Ottoman island in the middle of the Danube was left out of the 1878 Treaty of Berlin, stayed the Sultan's for decades, and went under the Iron Gates reservoir in 1970. This is its story, told from the Serbian bank. 0:00 The island under the water 0:51 The Iron Gates 2:28 The island nobody claimed 4:05 Life on Ada Kaleh 5:30 The dam 6:32 What they saved 8:02 What is left Narrated, written and edited by DVlad. Present-day aerials: Sergey Guk and Attila Pergel via Pexels. Archive, public domain: Library of Congress, Photochrom Collection; Eberhard Nabel (1970); Fortepan (Kazan and Iron Gates plates, 1902 to 1904); Mór Erdélyi (1896); Carl Simon; Gheorghe Petrașcu; Bibi Saint-Pol (bust of Trajan, Glyptothek Munich); Abdullah Frères (Sultan Abdulhamid II, 1869, Victoria and Albert Museum); Joe Mabel (19th-century lithograph); Julia Pardoe and W. H. Bartlett (1839); L. F. Marsigli (1726); Historical Archive of Negotin (1945 plan); postcards by Fotofilm Cluj, CPCS Romania and unknown publishers. Archive under Creative Commons. Changes: cropped and scaled; the shots marked "parallax" are animated with a 2.5D depth effect. Willy Pragher, Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg, Staatsarchiv Freiburg W 134, CC BY 4.0: 0:05, 2:39, 4:07, 5:06 (parallax); 4:35, 4:54, 5:12 Leo Wehrli, ETH-Bibliothek Zürich, CC BY-SA 4.0: 5:23 FORTEPAN / Drobni Nándor, CC BY-SA 3.0: 2:05, 6:13 FORTEPAN / Erky-Nagy Tibor, CC BY-SA 3.0: 7:31 Ванилица, CC BY-SA 4.0: 8:29 Pudelek, CC BY-SA 4.0: 5:32 Denis Barthel, CC BY-SA 3.0: 5:41 Petar Milošević, CC BY-SA 4.0: 6:38 Beko, CC BY-SA 4.0: 6:46, 8:32 ARCH AAG (Şimian, 2007), CC BY-SA 3.0 RO: 7:28, 7:54 Alex:D, CC BY-SA 3.0: 7:50 Mgolubovic, CC BY-SA 4.0: 8:23 Licences: creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 · creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0 · creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0 · creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ro Flags and icons: drawn for this film. Fonts: IBM Plex Mono and Fraunces (SIL Open Font License). Maps: Copernicus DEM (© DLR e.V. 2010-2014 and © Airbus Defence and Space GmbH 2014-2018, provided under COPERNICUS by the European Union and ESA); Natural Earth; New York Public Library (1909 Spezialkarte, CC0). Music: original score generated locally with ACE-Step 1.5 (AI music model, MIT licence). Sources for every fact are in the pinned comment. Treaty texts: Treaty of Berlin (1878), Article LVII; Treaty of Lausanne (1923), Articles 16 and 26, both on Wikisource.