ABSTRACT
Located on the maritime Danube (the 100-mile section of the river accessible to sea-going ships), the port city of Galați enjoys a favourable geographical position for developing significant shipbuilding installations. The only large fluvial outlet of the historical province of Moldavia, Galați lies on the left bank of the Danube, between two of its largest tributaries, the Siret and the Prut Rivers, which separate Moldavia from the neighbouring regions of Wallachia and Bessarabia respectively. Commerce in Galați increased gradually from the seventeenth century, when the port was visited by maritime ships wanting to convey the rich agro-pastoral resources of the Danubian principalities to the market of Constantinople. In the same period, historical sources refer to shipbuilding in a local shipyard, supplied with cheap and high-quality timber transported as rafts from the deep forests of the Carpathians down Moldavia’s network of rivers. Shipbuilding and ship repairing were the most lucrative industrial activities in Galați throughout the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, although construction techniques remained highly traditional and antiquated.
