Reading: Dobruja | region, Europe
Owing to its openness to the sea and its position as a zone of passage between the Balkans and the steppe north of the Black Sea, the population of the Dobruja has been divers. The majority in the north are romanian and in the south bulgarian, but, despite assimilation and emigration, significant minorities, notably Turks and Tatars, remain. The inhabitants are engaged chiefly in department of agriculture, specially in the resurrect of grains and cattle and in viticulture. Under the communists, from the 1940s, industrialization made rapid progress. Besides food process and fish, major industries—notably metallurgy and chemicals—developed around Constanƫa, the largest city and Romania ’ s main seaport.
Read more: List of Postcodes in Northern Territory (NT)
The earliest inhabitants of the Dobruja were the Getae, or Getians, a thracian people whom greek colonists encountered when they established trading cities on the Black Sea seashore in the sixth century bc. Between the first hundred bc and the third hundred ad, Rome dominated the area, which was known as Scythia Minor, and from the 5th to the 11th centuries Byzantine rule was contested by consecutive waves of mobile peoples, including Huns, Avars, Slavs, Bulgars, Pechenegs, and Cumans. In the fourteenth century a despotate headed by a Bulgarian named Dobrotitsa encompassed the region ( Dobruja may mean “ Land of Dobrotitsa ” ). Mircea, Prince of Walachia ( 1386–1418 ), besides claimed the region, but by 1419 the Ottoman Turks had incorporated it into their empire. During the future 450 years significant demographic changes occurred through the large-scale colony of anatolian Turks and Crimean Tatars. The Treaty of Berlin ( 1878 ) brought Ottoman rule to an end by awarding Romania most of the Dobruja and attaching the southerly fortune ( the alleged Quadrilateral ) to the principality of Bulgaria. Romania obtained the Quadrilateral after the second Balkan War in 1913, but in 1940 it was forced to return that parcel to Bulgaria and to accept an exchange of population. A new frontier was established by the Peace Treaty of Paris ( 1947 ).