For the 32-year-old, her adopted home of Sulina remains an "oasis of tranquility" despite the war in Ukraine a few miles away.The conflict is "looming as a threat" in her mind, creating "a feeling of unease," she told AFP. But having moved to Sulina five years ago, she opened the colourful store in February -- a testament to her will to stay.
Jeweller Roxana Saraev and her husband Claudiu have a shop in Sulina © Daniel MIHAILESCU / AFP
Reachable only via the river, Sulina was its normal quiet self when AFP visited the city in May. No air raid alerts rang out and no explosions boomed across the border.But the area is not always so calm, said Catalin Cosma, 33, who takes tourists on kayak trips on the Danube. During one outing, he saw drones hit the Ukrainian port of Vylkove across the river."It was terrifying," he said. "We sat there, lit a cigarette, poured ourselves a drink and said that was it. There was nowhere to go. Nothing you could do."
Sulina lies at the mouth of a branch of the Danube © Daniel MIHAILESCU / AFP
In four years of war, Romania has recorded 28 airspace breaches and 47 drone crashes, according to the defence ministry's latest data.The most serious incident struck on May 29 in the centre of the city of Galati, 150 kilometres (93 miles) north of Sulina.A drone -- Russian according to NATO -- hit a residential building and injured a woman and her adolescent son.Ships on the DanubeA blockade of Ukrainian ports after Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine forced Kyiv to ship grain via the Danube -- paradoxically raising the prospect of Sulina going back to its heyday.In the early 1900s Sulina's port handled half of all grain exports shipped via the river. But from 1920 the cosmopolitan city lagged behind the Black Sea port of Constanta -- a decline that accelerated after the fall of the communist regime.
