DUROSTOR (SILISTRA)

DUROSTOR (SILISTRA). – A city situated on the Bulgarian bank of the lower Danube, bearing the old, perhaps Celtic, name of Durostorm in Lower Moesia. It has been an episcopal see since the 4th century. After the Bulgarian conquest (c. 700), the conversion of the Bulgarians (865), and the death of Simeon under Pietro (927–69), the Byzantines accepted for a short time the patriarchal title of the archbishop of D., then called Dristra, a name that became Is-dristra in the Greek-Turkish period. At that time it was also occupied for a while by the Romanian princes of Wallachia. Finally called Silistra, and predominantly Bulgarian (about 1,700 inhabitants in 1930), it was occupied by the Romanians from 1913 to 1944, together with the “Quadrilateral,” or Southern Dobruja.