Mehedinți: how this area actually works
The gorge, the city on the river, and hills inland. The dam is the modern landscape. Caraș-Severin, Gorj, Dolj, and Serbia. Mehedinți is the name you will see on court stamps, road signs, and the heading of a local letter even when the English page you are reading says Mehedinți.
The river, energy, and a port city. Tourism at the gorge is secondary to the road. Serbian border trade is ordinary. Serbian prisons are not. Drobeta-Turnu Severin is the Danube city and county seat.
People heading for Drobeta-Turnu Severin still need Orșova on the list: the gorge town upstream. Vânju Mare is an inland town. The administrative centre is Drobeta-Turnu Severin. That city is where regional offices cluster; it is not automatically where a sentenced or remanded person is held.
Finding someone held in Mehedinți
Drobeta courts serve the county. Craiova is the Oltenian capital and a different județ. Confirm the ANP penitenciar in or for this county rather than assuming Craiova. The dam is not a gate. Name-search sites that scrape court journalism are not the National Prison Administration (ANP). They miss transfers and they invent certainty. Use the official channel.
A first arrest in Mehedinți can be followed by a transfer to another county if security category, sentence length, medical needs, or simple capacity require it. ANP assigns penitentiaries nationally. Rahova is in Bucharest; Jilava is in Ilfov. A județ of arrest is the paperwork, not a promise of the cell. People heading for Drobeta-Turnu Severin still need Baia de Aramă on the list: a northern hill town.
Keep the case number, the court, and any reference the lawyer used. When you contact the National Prison Administration (ANP), those details do more work than a date of birth alone. Letters from the institution, even short ones, usually name the facility more reliably than a relative’s memory of the police station.
Visits and family practicalities
Vizite are arranged with the named penitenciar under ANP rules. Approval and a matching identity document come before the journey. The desk compares your document to the approved list letter by letter. If your booking name and your passport diverge — a missing middle name, a transliteration — fix it before you travel to Drobeta-Turnu Severin. Rules on property, cash, clothing, and how many people may attend are set for each institution and change; copy them from the current official page rather than from a forum post about last year.
Stopping in Orșova or at a gorge viewpoint, or driving to Craiova, with the institution unread. If you are travelling from abroad, assume the visit is not a same-day add-on to a flight. Approval, the journey from Drobeta-Turnu Severin, and the time spent at the gate rarely fit between a morning landing and an evening departure. Iron Gates is the dam and gorge, not a prison.
Getting around Mehedinți
The Danube road is scenic and slower than it looks. The inland road from Craiova is the plainer option. The river line exists. Do not romanticise it into a visiting plan. Craiova or Timișoara, then a long edge road.
Gorge weather and summer traffic. The city itself is straightforward. Save the gate address in Romanian as well as English, and carry a paper copy. Rural approaches to institutions are often poorly labelled for visitors who only followed a motorway sign into Drobeta-Turnu Severin. Serbia is across the Danube. Different administration.