Danube once appears as the mother of Vrtra, "a dragon blocking the course of the rivers." The Finnish word for Danube is Tonava, which is most likely derived from the word for the river in Swedish and German, "Donau". Its Sámi name "Deatnu" means "Great River". It is possible that "dānu" in Scythian as in Avestan was a generic word for "river": "Dnieper" and "Dniestr", from "Danapris" and "Danastius", are presumed to continue Scythian "*dānu apara" "far river" and "*dānu nazdya-" "near river", respectively. The river was known to the ancient Greeks as the "Istros" (Ἴστρος) a borrowing from a Daco-Thracian
Commissions of the Danube River effective control of the Lower Danube in May 1939, when the Sinaia Agreement (concluded on 18 August 1938) entered into force. "See main articles Nazi rule over the Danube River (1938–1945) and Danube Commission (after 1945)" In 1938, a committee of experts inspected the Sulina and found it was almost impassable by that time. And in August of that same year, the regime of the two commissions was swept away by rise of German power on the river. A series of treaties put control in the hands of the Germans, who maintained it until the Nazi retreat in 1944 and