The Danube – Black Sea Canal is a canal

Canal

Canals are man-made channels for water. There are two types of canal:#Waterways: navigable transportation canals used for carrying ships and boats shipping goods and conveying people, further subdivided into two kinds:...

 in Romania

Romania

Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea...

 which runs from Cernavodă

Cernavoda

Cernavodă is a town in Constanţa County, Dobrogea, Romania with a population of 20,514.The town's name is derived from the Slavic černa voda , meaning "black water". This name is regarded by some scholars as a calque of the earlier Thracian name Axíopa, from IE *n.ksei "dark" and upā "water"...

 on the Danube

Danube

The Danube is a river in the Central Europe and the Europe's second longest river after the Volga. It is classified as an international waterway....

 to Agigea

Agigea

Agigea is a commune in Constanţa County, Romania. The commune includes two villages: Agigea and Lazu ....

 (southern arm) and Năvodari

Navodari

Năvodari is a town in Constanţa County, region of Dobrogea, Romania, with a population of 32,400.-History:The settlement was mentioned for the first time in 1421 under the name Kara Koyun , to be renamed later on Karaköy or Carachioi...

 (northern arm) on the Black Sea

Black Sea

The Black Sea is bounded by Europe, Anatolia and the Caucasus and is ultimately connected to the Atlantic Ocean via the Mediterranean and the Aegean seas and various straits. The Bosphorus strait connects it to the Sea of Marmara, and the strait of the Dardanelles connects that sea to the Aegean...

. Administrated from Agigea, it is an important part of the European canal system that links the North Sea

North Sea

In the southwest, beyond the Straits of Dover, the North Sea becomes the English Channel connecting to the Atlantic Ocean. In the east, it connects to the Baltic Sea via the Skagerrak and Kattegat, narrow straits that separate Denmark from Norway and Sweden respectively...

 to the Black Sea.

The Canal was notorious as the site of labor camp

Labor camp

A labor camp is a simplified detention facility where inmates are forced to engage in penal labor. Labor camps have many common aspects with slavery and with prisons...

s in 1950s Communist Romania

Communist Romania

Communist Romania was the period in Romanian history when that country was a Soviet-aligned communist state in the Eastern Bloc, with the dominant role of Romanian Communist Party enshrined in its successive constitutions...

, when, at any given time, several tens of thousands political prisoner

Political prisoner

According to the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, a political prisoner is ‘someone who is in prison because they have opposed or criticized the government of their own country’....

s worked on its excavation.