Alibey Lagoon

Alibey Lagoon occupies the old mouth of the Khadzhyder River on the Black Sea coast of Bessarabia. It is shallow and saline, about fifteen kilometres long and eleven wide, with an average depth of only two and a half metres. A sand bar separates it from the sea, while narrow channels connect it through the Kurudiol Lagoon with the Burnas, Shagany and Karachaus lagoons.

Fresh river water, seawater seeping through the bar and strong evaporation produced changing salinity, making the lagoon a meeting place for fish, waterbirds and the people who fished the coastal lakes and gathered salt from the shore. The lagoon lay within the Bessarabian borderlands contested by the Ottoman Empire, the Crimean Khanate and the Russian Empire, near the Ottoman fortress of Akkerman on the Dniester estuary. Control of the Danube mouths and the coastal corridor gave strategic weight to places that were physically slight. The shallow basin and its linked lagoons lay on the Danube-Dniester route, where grain, salt and river traffic moved between inland markets and Black Sea shipping.