Rome's Black Sea port — ancient casino, Ovid's exile, and summer beaches
Constanța is Romania's main Black Sea port and its oldest continuously inhabited city — founded by Greek colonists around 657 BCE as Tomis, later a Roman port where the poet Ovid was exiled by Augustus in 8 CE. The old town peninsula has Roman mosaic floors discovered under a 6th-century complex, a 4th-century Roman building in the port, and the iconic 1910 Art Nouveau casino on the seafront — one of Romania's most beautiful buildings, long derelict and finally under restoration. To the north, Mamaia is Romania's party beach resort; to the south, Vama Veche is the bohemian free-beach alternat…
Constanța's history spans 2,600 years from Greek Tomis, through Roman Constantiana (renamed after Emperor Constantine, who rebuilt it in the 4th century CE), Byzantine and Ottoman rule, to its 19th-century rebirth as Romania's window to the world. Ovid's exile here from 8 CE to his death in 17 CE was one of antiquity's most famous literary banishments — he wrote the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto from Tomis, and his statue stands in the city square. The port was critical to the grain trade connecting the Ukrainian and Romanian Black Sea coast to Constantinople, Venice, and the Ottoman Empire…