Chișinău is one of those capitals almost nobody has on their list and that, precisely for that reason, takes you by surprise. The capital of Moldova —one of the least visited countries in Europe— spreads out in a calm grid of wide boulevards, lime trees, chestnuts and dozens of parks, with a relaxed life of cafés, markets and terraces. There are no great Gothic cathedrals or crowds of tourists: there's a green, friendly and very affordable city, where you can walk from one end of the centre to the other and where the Soviet past sits alongside a young, European energy pushing forward.
The heart of the city is Ștefan cel Mare și Sfânt boulevard, which runs through the centre past the Cathedral of the Nativity, the Triumphal Arch, the government building, the opera house and the central park presided over by the statue of Stephen the Great, the medieval hero who defended Moldova against the Ottomans. Around it are museums, Orthodox churches, Stalinist buildings and the big Central Market, where people buy cheese, wine and fruit. But the real reason to come to Chișinău usually lies underground and on the outskirts: it's the perfect base for heading down into the largest underground wine cellars in the world and for escaping to the cave monasteries of the Moldovan countryside.
This guide covers the essentials of Chișinău with a practical, friendly eye: what to see in the centre on foot, how to get around on its trolleybuses and rutieras, how to plan trips to the wineries and to Orheiul Vechi, where to eat well and cheaply, and what to expect from a country that pays in Moldovan lei and still keeps the charm of the road less travelled. Moldova is one of the world's great wine powers, and Chișinău is the key to discovering it.
The history of Chișinău begins in 1436, when it is first mentioned as a small village in a document of the Principality of Moldavia. For centuries it was little more than a hamlet on the banks of the Bâc river, in the shadow of nearby Orhei and, later, under long Ottoman suzerainty. The big turning point came in 1812: after the Russo-Turkish war, the Russian Empire annexed the eastern half of the Principality of Moldavia, the region of Bessarabia, and made Chișinău its provincial capital. Under Russian rule the city grew fast, the grid of boulevards that still defines it was laid out, and the Cathedral of the Nativity and the Triumphal Arch were built. It was also the scene of dark chapters, such as the anti-Jewish pogrom of 1903, which shocked the world. After the First World War, Bessarabia joined Romania (1918-1940); then, under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Soviet Union occupied it in 1940 and made it the capital of the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. That same year a devastating earthquake struck the city, and soon after the Second World War left it in ruins. The Chișinău you see today is largely a Soviet post-war reconstruction, with wide avenues and monumental buildings. In 1991, with the fall of the USSR, Moldova declared independence and Chișinău became the capital of a young country that today looks towards the European Union. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The heart of the country: the capital, Chișinău, surrounded by the Codru forests, ancient monasteries and villages whose churches hold centuries of history.
Read the history of Chișinău and the centre →A local guide tells you in half an hour what no sign at the site will ever explain. We look ours up on Civitatis: guided in Spanish and booked online with no fuss. There are not many in Chisinau, but the ones there are worth it. And there are free tours here: you book without paying and tip the guide whatever you think at the end, so trying one costs you nothing. Tap the cards below and have a look.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
In 1436, when Chișinău first appears in a document, it was nothing more than a tiny village on the banks of the Bâc river, in the heart of the Principality of Moldavia. That document, signed by the voivodes Ilie and Ștefan, mentioned a small rural property next to a spring, and from that word (according to one of the most widely cited etymologies, from the old Romanian 'chișla nouă', 'the new spring') the name of the future capital would derive. Nothing back then suggested that this hamlet lost in the codri, the oak forests of central Moldavia, would one day become a city.
In those years the Principality of Moldavia was living its golden age under Stephen the Great (Ștefan cel Mare, who reigned from 1457 to 1504), the voivode who defended the land against Hungarians, Poles, Tatars and, above all, the growing power of the Ottoman Empire. Stephen won legendary battles and built dozens of churches and monasteries, and over time he would become the great national hero and even a saint of the Orthodox Church. His statue stands today at the centre of Chișinău, although he never saw the city as we know it.
After Stephen's death, Moldavia came under Ottoman suzerainty: it remained a principality with its own princes, but as a vassal of the sultan, obliged to pay tribute. Chișinău thus lay in frontier land, fought over for centuries by Ottomans, Crimean Tatars, Poles and, increasingly, the Russian Empire pushing south. Throughout that time it was just a market town of craftsmen, in the shadow of the nearby and more important centre of Orhei. Its history as a real city had not yet begun.
Chișinău's fate changed forever in 1812. That year, at the end of yet another Russo-Turkish war, the Ottoman Empire ceded to Russia the eastern half of the Principality of Moldavia, the land between the Prut and Dniester rivers that would come to be called Bessarabia. Russia needed a capital for its new province and chose Chișinău, then a large village, for its central position. Within a few decades, the village turned into an imperial city.
Under Russian rule the grid of wide boulevards was laid out that still defines the centre of Chișinău, very different from the tangled old town in the lower part. The great buildings of the period went up: the Cathedral of Christ's Nativity with its bell tower, commissioned in the 1830s, and the Triumphal Arch, erected in 1840 to celebrate a Russian victory over the Ottomans. The population grew at a dizzying pace: from a few thousand inhabitants at the start of the 19th century to more than 90,000 by 1862 and about 125,000 in 1900, with a mix of Moldovans (Romanians), Russians, Ukrainians, Jews, Bulgarians, Gagauz and Armenians.
That growth also had a tragic chapter. Chișinău had a large Jewish community, and in April 1903 one of the most brutal pogroms in the Europe of the time broke out there: over several days, mobs attacked the Jewish quarter, leaving dozens dead, hundreds injured and a huge number of homes and shops destroyed. The Kishinev pogrom (Kishinev was the city's Russian name) shocked world opinion, inspired poems and campaigns of protest, and accelerated Jewish emigration and the Zionist movement. It is a dark page that is also part of the city's memory.
The collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917, with the Bolshevik revolution, opened a short period of uncertainty. In 1918, amid the chaos, the national council of Bessarabia (the Sfatul Țării) first proclaimed autonomy and then union with the Kingdom of Romania. During the interwar years, between 1918 and 1940, Chișinău was a provincial Romanian city: the administration and schools were Romanianised and some buildings in the interwar style went up, although the city was somewhat overshadowed by Bucharest and other regional capitals.
That period came to an abrupt end in 1940. The secret Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, signed between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939, had carved up Eastern Europe into spheres of influence, and in June 1940 the USSR demanded and obtained Bessarabia. The Red Army entered Chișinău and the city became the capital of the new Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. Just a few months later, in November 1940, a powerful earthquake shook the region and caused major damage, adding destruction to an already turbulent political situation.
The Second World War hit Chișinău extremely hard. In 1941, German and Romanian troops attacked Soviet Moldavia; the city was heavily bombed and taken after resistance from the Red Army. During the occupation a ghetto was set up, and much of the Jewish community of the city and of Bessarabia was deported and murdered as part of the Holocaust. In 1944, the Soviet counteroffensive retook Chișinău after fresh fighting. When the war ended, the city lay largely in ruins: it had to be rebuilt almost from scratch.
The Chișinău that travellers walk through today is, to a large extent, a postwar Soviet city. After 1945, as capital of the Moldavian SSR, it was rebuilt and expanded according to the canons of Soviet planning: wide avenues, monumental squares, Stalinist-style government buildings and, later, sprawling districts of prefabricated housing blocks on the outskirts to house a population that kept growing with industrialisation and the arrival of people from all over the Union.
Many of the city's current symbols date from that era: the Government and Presidency buildings on the central boulevard, the Opera and Ballet Theatre, numerous museums and monuments, and the great 'Eternitate' Memorial Complex, opened in 1975, with its five concrete 'bayonets' and the eternal flame honouring those who fell in the war. The main boulevard itself, today called Ștefan cel Mare și Sfânt, was the backbone of that Soviet capital, lined with institutions and shops.
Under Soviet rule, Moldavia specialised in, among other things, farming and above all wine: the gigantic underground cellars of Cricova and Mileștii Mici, on the outskirts of Chișinău, were developed during those decades until they became the largest in the world, supplying the whole Soviet bloc. The city went through a degree of modernisation, but also cultural Russification and simmering tensions over the Romanian identity of most of the population, which would resurface strongly in the final years of the USSR.
In the late 1980s, with Gorbachev's 'perestroika', Chișinău became the stage for Moldova's national awakening. Huge demonstrations demanded recognition of Romanian as the official language and the Latin alphabet instead of Cyrillic, and rejected rule from Moscow. On 27 August 1991, as the Soviet Union was falling apart, Moldova declared its independence and Chișinău became the capital of a new sovereign state.
The first years were hard. In 1992 an armed conflict broke out with the region east of the Dniester, which has a Russian-speaking majority and declared itself independent as Transnistria (with its capital in Tiraspol); to this day it operates as a de facto breakaway territory, not recognised internationally. The economic transition of the 1990s was tough, with crises, mass emigration of Moldovans to Europe and Russia, and a slow rebuilding of institutions. Chișinău, however, remained the political, economic and cultural heart of the country.
In the 21st century, the capital has been modernising and looking more and more towards Europe. Moldova obtained EU candidate country status in 2022, and Chișinău has become a symbol of that European direction, with a livelier cultural scene, budding tourism drawn by wine tourism and a growing food scene. The city keeps its green, relaxed character, its Soviet heritage in plain sight and its role as the gateway to the underground wine cellars and cave monasteries that are the country's great treasure. Chișinău today is a small capital in transformation, just starting to reveal itself to travellers as one of the least known and most surprising corners of Europe.
