About Drobeta-Turnu Severin

       Drobeta-Turnu Severin (colloquially Severin) is a city in Mehedinți County, Oltenia region, Romania, situated on the northern bank of the Danube, close to the Iron Gates I dam. “Drobeta” is the name of the ancient Dacian and Roman towns at the site, and the modern town of Turnu Severin received the additional name of Drobeta during Nicolae Ceaușescu’s national-communist dictatorship as part of his myth-making efforts. The city’s population is 92,617 (2011) and 104,035 (2022), up from 18,628 in 1900.

       It is situated in western Oltenia, at the edge of the Topolnița depression, 220 km south-east of Timișoara, 113 km west of Craiova and 353 km west of Bucharest. The area of the city is 55 km², with an elevation of 65 m. The region’s climate gives Severin warm summers and mild winters, meaning the city is home to magnolia trees, Caucasian nut trees, and ginkgo biloba as well as the almond trees, figs, lilacs, lindens and chestnut trees, more common throughout Europe. The climate in the region can be classified as a “sub-Mediterranean climate”.

       Some notable natives from Drobeta-Turnu Severin: Ion Biberi (a Romanian prose writer, essayst and literary critic), Paul Dimo (a Romanian electrical engineer, creator of REI method of nodal analysis of electric networks, contributed also to the development of electrification Plan of Romania), Niculae I. Herescu (a Romanian classical scholar, essayist, translator and poet. Descended from a noble family of Oltenia, he was trained in Latin and became a full professor at the University of Bucharest while still in his twenties. He translated widely from the Roman canon, as well as publishing a series of studies devoted to ancient writers. Meanwhile, Herescu wrote poetry of his own, and was president of the Romanian Writers’ Society for several years. He left his native country shortly before a Soviet occupation began, and spent the last part of his life in exile, first in Portugal and then in France), Anghel Mora (the pen name of Mihai Diaconescu was a film director, script writer, actor, poet, PR agency director, and folk musician from Romania), Mirel Matei Rădoi (a Romanian professional football manager and former player. He is the current manager of Saudi Arabian club Al-Tai), Gheorghe Țițeica (a Romanian mathematician, publishing as George or Georges Tzitzéica, who made important contributions in geometry. He is recognized as the founder of the Romanian school of differential geometry), Monica Vișan (a Romanian mathematician at the University of California, Los Angeles who specialized in PDE – partial differential equation- and is well known for her work on the nonlinear Schrödinger equation).

The water castle

‘Sfantul Gheorghe’ ortodox cathedral