Силистра

The city of Durostorum and Medjidi tabia, a fortress on the Danube Limes for two millennia.

In 106 AD, during the time of Emperor Trajan, the camp of the elite XI Claudius Legion was located on the site of today's Silistra and the ancient city of Durostorum was founded — one of the important military centers along the Danube Limes of the Roman Empire. Here, in the 5th century, the future general Flavius Aetius was born, called by historians "the last Roman", the winner of the Hun leader Attila in the battle of the Catalaunian Fields in 451. During the time of Emperor Justinian I (6th century) the fortress wall of Durostorum was largely restored; its southern section, revealed during excavations in 1986–1987 and 2007–2012, is still today the best-preserved fragment of the ancient fortress system, visible behind the town square. During the Bulgarian Middle Ages, the city was known as Druster (Dorostol) and was one of the significant fortresses on the Danube border of the Bulgarian state, a witness to important military events in the 10th century. After the Ottoman conquest, Druster became known as Silistra and was the center of the eponymous Silistra eyalet — one of the major administrative units of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans, and the city remained an important Danube fortress. Between 1841 and 1853, according to the project of the German military engineer Helmut von Moltke, the Mejidi Tabiya fortress was built, named after Sultan Abdul Mejid I, who visited the site in 1847 - one of the large-scale examples of late Ottoman fortification, preserved to this day. After the Liberation in 1878, Silistra established itself as a border town of Bulgaria along the Danube, and in the following decades it remained an important port point against its northern neighbor Romania. In 1942, on the southern outskirts of the city, in the necropolis of Durostorum, a Roman dome tomb richly decorated with wall paintings was accidentally discovered. Today, Silistra is a port city on the Danube River on the European Transport Corridor No. 7, connected by ferry to the Romanian city of Calaras, and combines its rich archaeological heritage — from Durostorum and Druster to Medjidi Tabia — with its role as the administrative center of Northern Dobrudja.