Moldova trip
I thought I knew what to expect from Moldova. I didn’t.
A country that didn’t try to impress, yet somehow worked — streets, flavors, people, and stories existing side by side, without explanation, in a place most outsiders still imagine only through the faded clichés of Europe’s eastern edge. This is neither a guidebook nor a judgment, but the story of a slow realization: how much remains invisible as long as we only look, and do not truly pay attention.
Series
This post is part of a larger series. Here you can see where you are – and what’s already done.
Now: Experience
Moldova Trip
Next: Museums
National History Museum of Moldova (Chișinău)
Show contents
Prologue
Quick post
Legend
Experience
Museums
Itinerary
Day plan
Epilogue
Alo, salut, sunt eu un haiduc
I arrived in Moldova as a beginner. I hadn’t read a guidebook, hadn’t prepared, and left everything to my travel companions. In my head lived a few well-worn Eastern European stereotypes: the image of a backward country where everything is grey, slow, and faintly hopeless — the kind of place many in the West still imagine when they hear “former Soviet space.” I knew nothing about its drinking culture, and its legends were no more than vague fragments. At that point, Moldova wasn’t a destination; it was just a blurred patch on the map.
At the time, there were no direct flights between Budapest and Chișinău, so we set off on a turboprop plane via Bucharest. In Bucharest, a technical issue grounded us for nearly five hours. Time doesn’t pass in airports — it erodes: first the minutes, then patience, and finally common sense. We killed the hours with other Hungarians heading to Moldova, armed with beer, Unicum — a bitter Hungarian herbal liqueur — and vodka. By the end of the evening, irony had done its work: the delay had thrown us together with former owners of a major Hungarian news outlet, the kind of encounter that only happens while waiting for a flight that refuses to leave.
I didn’t know then that this was merely a warm-up. That everything I thought I knew about Moldova wouldn’t be disproved, but would quietly lose its meaning altogether — and that this would become the journey’s most uncomfortable surprise: just how good it would feel to be there.
VLAD
After landing, Vlad was waiting for us at the airport — simultaneously a customs officer, the marketing director of a four-star hotel, and an Airbnb host. In Moldova, this feels less like a career change and more like a single job description. The pre-arranged airport transfer turned out to be a thoroughly exhausted BMW 5 Series; somehow, five of us plus our luggage managed to fit, and we headed toward the city.
On the way, Vlad questioned us with stubborn thoroughness about where we were from, then showed visible relief when it turned out we were not Jewish — a moment rooted less in hostility than in the region’s tangled mix of old prejudices, practical anxieties, and inherited reflexes that still surface in unexpected ways.
The next morning, we walked over to a four-star hotel for breakfast. At the reception desk, it was enough to say, “Vlad sent us.” We were let in while the porter muttered a private commentary under his breath, alternating between Vlad’s name and the word kurwa — a widely used Eastern European swearword that travels easily across borders. In the end, of course, we still had to pay for breakfast.
A City That Works — Even Though It Shouldn’t
Chișinău very quickly knocked me out of the image I had built of it in advance. It wasn’t spectacular, it wasn’t loud, it didn’t try to please — it simply worked. It was clean, orderly, and surprisingly friendly. Poverty was visible — in 2019 the average net monthly wage barely reached the equivalent of about sixty euros — yet nothing seemed to be falling apart. Public spaces were cared for, trash didn’t pile up on the streets, there were no homeless people in sight, benches were repaired, grass was cut. Families picnicked in the parks as if this were the most natural thing in the world.
Prices reflected this reality. From a Hungarian perspective everything felt strikingly cheap, but never derelict or degraded. The city didn’t look like it was waiting to be rescued; it looked like it had quietly learned how to manage with what it had.
The same experience continued the next day at the National Museum of History of Moldova — only in a more concentrated form. One wing of the building had stood for years with a collapsed roof; in the other, an antique furniture shop was operating. At first glance, this did not promise much. Yet the exhibition itself was surprisingly coherent. There were awkward solutions and overdone display figures, but the core held together.
Especially striking was the Alcedar–Echimăuți nomadic culture, whose material world bore an uncanny resemblance to that of the early Hungarians during the period of conquest in the Carpathian Basin. The exhibition didn’t make claims; it asked questions — and left them open.
The same pattern repeated itself at the table. The foundations of Moldovan cuisine felt familiar: Hungarian comfort flavors, Balkan-style spiced grills, Slavic techniques of pickling and preservation. Not reinterpreted, not fashionable, just coexisting side by side. It didn’t want to be more than it was — and that, somehow, made it work all the better..
Political Crisis, at Close Range
During our stay, Chișinău was in the middle of a political crisis. The pro-Russian government had lost its parliamentary majority, then — according to the news, with a little help from Russian rubles — six opposition MPs suddenly changed their minds and crossed over to the ruling party. The numbers started working again; the streets did not stay quiet. Large-scale protests filled the city, and the police made sure public order would not be left to chance. Crowd control was swift and theatrical, following reflexes familiar from Eastern Europe in the mid-2000s.
We were stopped as well — asked for documents, briefly assessed — and once it became clear that we were tourists, we were greeted with wide smiles, welcomed to Moldova, wished a pleasant stay, and promptly sent on our way as the officers rushed back toward the crowd. Despite the political tension, we never felt unsafe for a moment. Everywhere we went, it was clear we were welcome. The city functioned — just not in the way a Western guidebook would know how to describe.
On our way back that evening, we noticed groups camping in tents near the parliament building. They introduced themselves as “rural citizens,” camped there in defense of the government. We tried to talk to them, but English suddenly disappeared, and answers stopped coming. In a few open tents, however, it was easy to see soldiers taking off their uniforms and changing into civilian clothes. At that point, no further questions were necessary.
Göring and Putin, Side by Side
After the political noise, a completely different world opened beneath us. Following the military history museum, we headed toward the Cricova winery — which is not merely a winery, but an underground city carved into the tunnels of a former limestone mine. The story gained momentum in the 1950s, when the Soviet army transported Hermann Göring’s confiscated wine collection here — roughly one and a half million bottles that had to be hidden somewhere. The mine proved ideal. The wine stayed. The cellar began to grow.
Today, the tunnel system stretches for nearly ninety kilometers, complete with street names, intersections, and sectors kept at different temperatures. What remains of the Göring collection can still be viewed in a vault shaped like a wine glass — a space that feels simultaneously like a museum and a faintly unsettling memorial. Cricova also maintains private vaults for figures such as Vladimir Putin and Angela Merkel. Here, this isn’t a political statement so much as a natural consequence of how the system evolved.
Moldovan winemaking and hospitality operate at a level that would stand anywhere in the world. If a single fact were needed to prove it, this would suffice: Putin celebrated his fiftieth birthday here. The sparkling wine matters too — the production method behind Sovetskoye Igristoye, the once-iconic Soviet champagne style, is said to have been developed here, and the Moldovan version far surpasses what that name usually means elsewhere. Electric vehicles run through the tunnels on a schedule, as if this were the most natural thing in the world.
Down there, underground, Moldova does not explain itself — it simply shows what it is capable of.
Az éjszaka, ami nem kérdez
We didn’t arrive at Havana Mama for the first time. We had been there the night before and had felt unmistakably at home — enough so that the next day we tipped Vlad and asked him to take a small detour and bring us back. Vlad didn’t take this as a request, but as an assignment. At the crosswalk he drove up onto the sidewalk, honking his way past pedestrians, and stopped directly in front of the bar’s entrance. We stepped almost straight from the car into the bar; in Chișinău, the night doesn’t begin — it continues.
An important clarification: this Vlad is not that Vlad. In Moldova, an astonishing number of men answer to this name, so here “Vlad” functions less as a personal name than as a role. Our Vlad was simultaneously a driver, a connection, an institution, and a solution.
They remembered us at Havana Mama. The group sitting in the central seats was asked to move, the male waiters were sent to the back, and we were served by the women. There was nothing forced about it. In Chișinău, hospitality hasn’t yet turned into a polite form of extracting money from tourists: they are glad to have guests, and glad for the tip. Small, practical details everywhere — damp paper in the ashtrays, ice cubes placed in the urinals.
At the end of the night we stopped at a 24-hour shop beneath a housing block, where we encountered gopnik culture up close for the first time — the post-Soviet street subculture of tracksuits, bravado, and territorial curiosity. There were some half-hearted attempts to pick a fight, but since we spoke neither Romanian nor Russian, we fell back on English, German, and French — smiling, polite, asking questions. After a while, they gave up. The conflict found no common language, and we went on our way without trouble.
In Chișinău, even that worked.
We Left Moldova — But Not Entirely
In the end, we reached the airport exhausted, overloaded with experiences, stories, and cognac. The journey home wasn’t a full stop at the end of a sentence — it was a comma. Ever since then, whenever my travels take me through Romania, I routinely fill the trunk with Moldovan wines and spirits — not out of nostalgia, but out of habit. This trip didn’t close anything; it set something in motion: a shared travel ritual among friends, a direction we keep returning to.
The stories didn’t end here. They simply continued elsewhere — and this was when the real processing of the experience began, along with the slow realization that everything we had seen had more layers than were visible on the surface at the time.
The Transnistrian experiences are told in a separate piece.
A transznisztriai élményeket egy külön bejegyzésben olvashatjátok.
Where next?
Continue the series – pick the next stop.
Now: Experience
Moldova Trip
Next: Museums
National History Museum of Moldova (Chișinău)
Show contents
Prologue
Quick post
Legend
Experience
Museums
Itinerary
Day plan
Epilogue
Sources
This post is based on personal experiences and photographs.
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Part of the Tales from the Balkans series by Absurd Empire.
