MOLDOVA

Intriguingly, one of the top tourist attractions in Moldova is not a place inside Moldova.

Transnistria or the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic, is a confetti strip of Russian-speaking territory on the left side of the Dniester River that declared itself independent in 1992 after fighting a brief but bloody war to break off from Moldova.

No country has so far recognized Transnistria as a sovereign nation, not even Russia which underwrites the territory’s de facto status by protecting it with its army and supplying it with money and free gas.

Today all visitors (even Moldovans) need to have a passport and fill out a simple form at the border to get into Transnistria. No entry stamp or visa is needed nor given as under international law and treaties, Transnistria does not exist.

Even so, the country has its own currency, president, army and a fiery flag.

Although the country occupies the region in Moldova where historically factories and industries are located, it now survives mainly by selling cognac, smuggling and on Russia’s goodwill.

Transnistria’s existence as a political terra nullius surrounded by unfriendly neighbours has allowed organised crime to flourish within its borders.

Many Moldavians blame Transnistrians for the bad publicity their country is getting overseas. They say that most of the smuggling of weapons and women people say are coming out of Moldova happen in fact in Transnistria.

On their part, Transnistrians (almost in equal numbers Russians, Ukrainians and ethnic Moldavians), are aghast at the prospect of being swallowed up by Romania as part of Moldova and have clung on to the security and nostalgia of the old soviet system. They held a referendum in 2006 in which they voted overwhelmingly (98%) to join Russia.

Not having visited Russia before and excited to visit what I had read on the Internet is the world’s last slice of the USSR, I half-expected to find in the capital Tiraspol, matryoshka-like matrons forming queues to buy bread, goose-stepping soldiers in huge grey public squares and rusting hammer and sickle signs everywhere.

Instead when Eugeniu drove me across from Chisinau in a red rented Chinese-made sedan on a warm and sunny afternoon a month ago, I found a surprisingly pleasant and ordinary place. Tiraspol looked to me, a spic, span and spacious place perhaps more like a New Zealand town on Boxing Day than the capital of a renegade Soviet-styled republic

All images copyright Kerk Boon Leng Oct 2014

Nov 6, 2014Nov 7, 2014 by dkwts Categories: MOLDOVA, TRANSNISTRIATags: Chisinau to Tiraspol, Tiraspol travel, Transdnenistria Travel, Transnistria Travel, Transnistria Travel photos, Visiting Transnistria Blog 3 Comments

For a person who has just turned fifty and wishes to see a bit of Europe again beyond cobbled stoned cities, cheese shops and castles, Moldova can be a dream destination.

To begin with, you get to experience a rare part of Europe with no immigrants and very few tourists – close to the kind of feeling I imagine early Asian or African visitors would have felt arriving in places like Birmingham, Berlin or Brussels in the 1940s.

Part of the allure is that not many people know anything about Moldova. There is no history or guide book written on just this country alone that I know of. My friend Jerry thought it was a country in Africa when I told him I was going there. But Moldova is actually located deep in Eastern Europe, to the east of Romania landlocked away by Ukraine from Russia and the Black Sea.

Due to its location in the western end of the great steppes and plains of Eurasia (known as Scythia in 11th century BC to 2nd century AD), the region that became Moldova was settled for hundreds of years by migrating tribesmen, peasants, armies and exiles from all corners including people with blue eyes and fair hair from the north and west , olive skin and aquiline noses from the south and also black hair and high cheekbones from the east.

A land of sun-kissed fields and black chernozem soil lying between the Rivers Prut and Dniestr known as Bessarabia, Moldova has always remained as someone else’s back garden: peripheral, exploited and forever at empire’s edge.

From the later half of the 14th century onwards it gradually became part of Moldavia, one of three principalities which together with Wallachia and Transylvania historically make up Romania.

Bessarabia was split up and ruled intermittently as vassal provinces of the Ottoman Empire from the mid-16 th century until 1812, when the defeated Turks formally signed the Treaty of Bucharest on 28 May giving the territory to Russia as a war trophy to be appended to its expanding empire.

Following the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and under pressure from the Romanian Army who had been invited in to maintain order, Bessarabia swiftly declares its independence and in 1918 entered into a political union with Romania on condition of territorial autonomy.

During WW II following the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact between Hitler and Stalin, the Soviet Union on 28 June 1940 seized Bessarabia from Romania to create the Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic. With the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 Moldova became an independent country for the first time.

Today Moldova is a nation seemingly unsure of itself and one with an image crisis partly of its own making.

Just while Moldova is often prefaced in western news as Europe’s poorest country, ordinary westerners continue to spread the image of the country as backward, crime infested and populated by beautiful women eager to marry rich foreigners or be smuggled abroad to work as prostitutes. Such simplistic depictions betray Europe’s dangerous ignorance about its own past and are clearly wrong.

Despite the unflattering statistics about low per capita income and human development, the country has a well-educated and culturally sophisticated population of 4 million that speak both Slavic and Latin-based languages, a nice capital city with good roads lined with handsome deciduous trees, affordable food that are grown from the earth including apples with a crunch and taste amazingly better than any I have ever eaten.

Moldova is rich in agriculture and human potentials. It is a country that is better than what outsiders and tragically even its own citizens believe. In my last evening in Chisinau as I stood with my new friend Eugene drinking coffee and eating his favourite hot dog in front of the city’s French School I felt a strange reluctance to leave this quiet, humbling and slightly surreal country.