Inhabitants
The Danube Delta is perhaps the least inhabited region of temperate Europe. In the Romanian side live about 20,000 people, of which 4,600 in the port of Sulina, which gives an average density of approx. 2 inhabitants per km². The rest is scattered in 27 villages, of which only three, all situated marginally, have more than 500 people (2002). The city of Tulcea, at the western edge of the delta, has a population of 92,000 (2002). It represents the node of the region and the gate to the delta.
The acute isolation and the harsh conditions of living, based mainly on subsistence, made the Danube Delta a place of emigration, or at least of transit. Very few of the people born here stay through adulthood; at the same time, the origins of the inhabitants fall within a wide range, as people from the most various places of Romania can be found in the delta. The total population has somewhat remained constant throughout the 20th century; there were 12,000 inhabitants in the 1890s, and 14,000 before the Second World War. Romanians count for approximately 80%, and Ukrainians for 10%. Other people living in the delta include Greeks, Turks and Bulgarians (1992). Distinctive for the region, but very vague as an ethnic entity are the Lipovans, descendants of the Orthodox Old Rite followers who fled Russia in the 18th century from religious persecution. About a third of the employed population is engaged in fishing and pisciculture, while another third is engaged in farming (1996). However, the quasi-totality practice fishing, more or less legally, as a means of subsistence or extra money.
In the Ukrainian side, located at the northern edge of the delta, the town of Izmail has a population of 85,000, Kiliya, 21,800 and Vilkovo, the main center of Lipovan community, 9,300.
Read more about this topic: Danube Delta
Famous quotes containing the word inhabitants:
“The principle of asceticism never was, nor ever can be, consistently pursued by any living creature. Let but one tenth part of the inhabitants of the earth pursue it consistently, and in a day’s time they will have turned it into a Hell.”
—Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832)
“Our woods are sylvan, and their inhabitants woodmen and rustics; that is selvaggia, and the inhabitants are salvages. A civilized man, using the word in the ordinary sense, with his ideas and associations, must at length pine there, like a cultivated plant, which clasps its fibres about a crude and undissolved mass of peat.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Do you know what Agelisas said, when he was asked why the great city of Lacedomonie was not girded with walls? Because, pointing out the inhabitants and citizens of the city, so expert in military discipline and so strong and well armed: “Here,” he said, “are the walls of the city,” meaning that there is no wall but of bones, and that towns and cities can have no more secure nor stronger wall than the virtue of their citizens and inhabitants.”
—François Rabelais (1494–1553)