3 Days in Chișinău

Moldovans call the park Grădina Publică, the public garden, and its gateway is the bronze statue of Stephen the Great, the 15th-century prince who held off the Ottomans for decades. The statue itself has had a harder life than he did. Cast in Bucharest in 1927 from the bronze of six Ottoman cannons captured in 1877-78, it was unveiled on 29 April 1928.

After the Soviet takeover in June 1940 it was shipped to Vaslui in Romania, and its plinth was torn down. It came back in 1942, was evacuated again in 1944 to Craiova, and was found there in 1945 by a sculptor who reported it to the Soviet authorities. A 1967 plan to move it was dropped after student protests, and in the 1970s it was shoved 18 meters deeper into the park onto a plain concrete base. A new plinth with the original inscriptions came back in 1989.

Two minutes east is the Triumphal Arch, a 13 m gateway finished in 1840 by Luka Zaushkevich to mark Russia's victory over the Ottomans in the war of 1828-29. For over 170 years it carried a 6,400 kg bell in its upper level, cast from captured Ottoman cannons, which was taken out in 2011. The clock was fully restored in 1973, and it's lit at night but doesn't chime.

It stands on the axis of the square in front of Government House, with the cathedral behind it. In 1945 the Soviets added plaques with the names of local Heroes of the Soviet Union, removed in 1991. Walk through it, look at the Corinthian capitals up close and move on: it's a ten-minute stop, not an hour.

The Nativity Cathedral is the main church of the Moldovan Orthodox Church, built between 1830 and 1836 to a Neoclassical design by Abram Melnikov, with six Doric columns on the front. It was bombed in World War II, its bell tower was blown up in 1962 and the building became an exhibition hall. Worship was banned. It went back to the church in 1989, and the present bell tower was built in 1997.

Go in quietly, with covered shoulders and knees. The interior walls were blank in Soviet times and are painted again. In the park around it you'll find the souvenir bazaar along Columna Street, where prices are negotiable, and a flower market on the north side of the park.

Three minutes behind the cathedral, on Columna Street, Foișor is the cheap lunch: zeama, the sour chicken noodle soup, and blini, the thin pancakes. Order the soup first and add pancakes if you're still hungry.

Moldovan food is hearty and cheap. For a sit-down meal with a wine list, wait for dinner.

Walk 15 minutes south-east to the Central Market, the biggest and busiest food market in the city. It covers around 3.5 hectares between Armenească, Mitropolit Varlaam and Tighina streets, and until 1991 it carried its Russian name, Tsentralny Rynok. The central bus station is across the road, which is why the whole area feels like a crossroads.

Go straight to the cheese halls. The sellers will let you taste before you buy, and a lot of it is brânză, the fresh white cheese that goes on everything. Look for langoși, fried dough with potato, cheese, cabbage or liver, sold from glass carts, and for pickled eggplant, carrot and mushrooms. Bring small notes.

La Taifas, on Strada București, is a family-run Moldovan restaurant in a cellar, the kind of place that suits a first proper dinner. It serves mămăligă with cheese and sour cream, sarmale, the cabbage rolls, and a wine list of Moldovan bottles, many by the glass.

Reserve a table, because it also hosts groups. Order a Moldovan red by the glass. If you'd rather spend the evening at a show, the Maria Bieșu Opera and Ballet Theatre at 152 Ștefan cel Mare has performances several nights a week; check tnob.md for dates and prices.

The National Museum of History holds a huge collection, and it's the most useful place to understand a country that has been passed between empires: Moldavia, Russian Bessarabia, Romania and the Soviet Union all left their mark here.

It's a serious museum, not a flashy one. Some captions have English, and the building itself is worth a look, down to the walls and floors. Don't try to see everything: pick the archaeology and the 20th-century rooms and leave.

Five minutes from the museum on Pushkin Street, Gălbenuș is a self-service place where you take what you want and pay by weight. It's the quickest way to try several Moldovan dishes at once, such as sarmale or a plăcintă, whatever is on the counter that day.

Eat early, because you have a tour to catch.

Take a taxi or a trolleybus to the railway station area, where the 24-story Hotel Cosmos stands. It took nine years to build, 1974 to 1983, and has 380 rooms. Soviet Moldova was a popular holiday republic, and occupancy ran at 90% in summer and often 100% from September to November. After independence the tourists went away, the hotel was privatized from 2000, and in 2026 it no longer operates.

So this is an exterior stop. Look at the tower, then at the equestrian statue in front of it, of Grigory Kotovsky, the Bessarabia-born Red Army commander. It's a good picture of what the Soviet Union built for visitors, and what happened when they stopped coming.

Ten minutes further south by taxi, on Dacia Boulevard, the Porțile Orașului are a group of tall residential blocks that frame the southern entrance to the city, on the road from the airport. They went up between the late 1970s and early 1980s, designed by Iulia Skvortsova, A. Markovich and Anatol Spasov from an idea by the architect Yuri Tumanyan, and the tallest has 24 floors, about 70 m.

They're apartment buildings, not a monument, so look from the road and take your pictures. The zoo and the village museum are on one side and the Botanical Garden is on the other, if you'd like a walk before your tour.

Mileștii Mici is about 17 km south of the center, and under the village there are roughly 200 km of tunnels, left by quarrying of the local white limestone, with only part of them used for wine. Its Golden Collection is listed in the Guinness World Records as the largest wine collection in the world, about 2 million bottles. The underground streets are named after grapes: Cabernet, Aligoté, Fetească.

You can't just turn up. The cellar asks you to book a tour by phone, email or its website, and packages differ in how many wines you taste. The galleries stay at 12-14°C all year, so bring a jacket. Don't plan to drive afterwards.

Back in town, the Keller Holz Gastropub on Ștefan cel Mare is the easy evening: the restaurant of an Austrian-Moldovan brewing company, with its own craft beer and snacks. After a day of wine, a beer is a good change.

Tomorrow starts early, so keep it short. If you want the local mass-market beer instead, ask for Bere Chișinău.

Cricova is 14 km north of the center. Its first sparkling wines were put to age in old limestone workings in 1947, the winery dates itself from 1952, and the company says it was the first in the country to make sparkling wine by the traditional method. The wine is stored about 60 m underground, in galleries more than 120 km long.

The 1954 collection is said to include bottles that came from Hermann Goering's cellar as war spoils. If you can only do one of the two cellars, take Mileștii Mici for the record and Cricova for the sparkling wine, but day two already gave you the first.

From Cricova it's about 42 km and under an hour to the village of Butuceni, which sits on a bend of the Răut river. The village has guesthouses that serve country food such as mămăligă, sarmale, cheese and house wine.

Eat before the monastery, not after, and keep it to 45 minutes if you want daylight on the cliffs.

Orheiul Vechi is the one Moldovan sight that looks like nowhere else. The Răut river has cut a deep, narrow loop into limestone, and on the cliff is a monastery dug into the rock, with chapels in caves and a small church on top. The site holds a Geto-Dacian fortress, a Golden Horde town of the 14th century and a Moldavian one, plus the cave monastery, dated to the 13th or 14th century depending on the source.

A few monks still live here. The caves are chapels, with Old Church Slavonic inscriptions from the 1690s, when outlaws called hajduks hid from the Ottomans. Cover your shoulders and wear shoes with grip, because the paths are stony. Fees and opening hours aren't clearly published, so ask your driver to check.

The monastery is the headline, but the complex around it is older and bigger. On the plateau and the neighboring promontories lie the earthworks of the Geto-Dacian fort and the foundations of the Golden Horde town of the 14th century, known as Shehr al-Jedid, and then the Moldavian town of Orhei, which was abandoned and refounded as today's Orhei further away.

There is little to see above the ground, so go to the small museum at the exhibition center first and look at the maps. The ruins of a Turkish bath are a short walk off the river, and the cliffs are best from the paths at the edge. Leave by 3:30pm so you're back on the road before dark.