Constanța

Constanța stands on the Black Sea coast at the site of ancient Tomis, founded by Greek settlers from Miletus in the sixth century BC. Under Rome it became a provincial centre, and in AD 8 the emperor Augustus sent the poet Ovid into exile here. His poems lamented his distant home and the unfamiliar shores of the Black Sea. In medieval times Genoese merchants maintained a trading post at the port.

In the fourteenth century Constanța belonged to the realm of Dobrotitsa, before the Ottomans and the Wallachian ruler Mircea contested the coast. The Ottomans took the town in the early fifteenth century and called it Köstence. When Evliya Çelebi visited in the seventeenth century, he described a small settlement with a mosque and dozens of grain warehouses, signs of the port's continuing role in the Black Sea trade.