Moldova Discovery Guide

Moldova is the last cheap, quiet, wine-soaked corner of Europe, and it is quiet for a reason: the war in Ukraine is across the eastern border, Canada advises a high degree of caution and the UK advises against any travel to Transnistria. Everywhere else the country is at peace and almost empty of tourists. It has the largest wine cellar and the largest wine collection in the world within 20 kilometres of its capital, and a 14th-century cave monastery still inhabited by monks above a river bend at Old Orhei. There is a fortress of 1499 at Soroca, more than fifty monasteries, 300 days of sun, and hills that never top 430 metres.

The main travel issue

The roads, which the advisories call poorly maintained, unlit and full of carts and drunk drivers, and a cash economy where few ATMs take foreign cards.

The solution

Base in Chișinău, take the 7-lei trolleybus and the minibuses, hire a driver for the wineries and monasteries, and read the advisories before thinking about Tiraspol.

If you travel slowly

Base in Chișinău, the city of 567,000 on the Bîc that holds a third of the country, and go out by the day: Cricova 15 kilometres north for the 120-kilometre cellar city, Mileștii Mici 18 kilometres south for the Guinness-listed 1.5 million bottles, Căpriana 40 kilometres north-west for the royal monastery of 1429, and Old Orhei for the day the cave church and the Răut deserve. Stay a night in Trebujeni or Butuceni below the ridge.

If you want to see the essentials

Chișinău's Nativity Cathedral of 1830–36 and Triumphal Arch of 1840, the central park and the market; Old Orhei's layered ruins, Geto-Dacian, Golden Horde and Moldavian, and its monks; Soroca's curved-walled fortress of 1499 on the Dniester a few kilometres from Ukraine; and one winery with its tasting.

If you seek local character

Romanian on the signs and Russian in half the mouths, mămăligă and sarma on the table, divin brandy after it, and a monastery culture that counts over fifty houses and 700 churches; Comrat for the Turkic, Orthodox Gagauz of the south.

If you want to go beyond the obvious

Purcari, founded 1827, and Castel Mimi, planted 1893, in the wine south; the Codru forest reserve of 1971 in the hills that give the centre its name; and the Dniester monasteries at Saharna and Țipova. Transnistria -- Tiraspol, Suvorov's city of 1792, and Bender's Ottoman fortress -- is a place the British advisory says not to go and the Canadian says to avoid unless essential; this page does not send anyone there.

Moldova is a Romanian-speaking country that spent most of the last two centuries inside Russia's empire and union, and its culture is the argument between those two facts. The language is Romanian by law, the alphabet Latin since 1989, the church Orthodox for nine people in ten, and the food -- mămăligă, sarma, placinte, divin brandy and wine from every village plot -- is Moldavian on both sides of the Prut. But a third of the population's forebears were settled here by the tsars or the Soviets, Russian is everywhere in the towns, Gagauzia in the south is a Turkic Orthodox autonomy that looked to Moscow, and Transnistria across the Dniester has been a self-declared republic with a Russian garrison of 1,200 since the war of 1992.

Wine is the national identity that everyone agrees on: 148,500 hectares of vines, 142 wineries, the world's largest cellar at Cricova and largest collection at Mileștii Mici, 60 per cent of exports to the EU since Russia's embargoes, and a homemade barrel in most rural households. The monasteries are the other: over fifty of them, Căpriana of 1429 the oldest, Old Orhei's cave church the strangest, and the Dniester cliffs at Saharna and Țipova the most dramatic.

The politics is the newest layer. Since Maia Sandu's election in 2020 the country has turned west -- EU candidate in June 2022, European integration in the constitution by referendum in 2024 -- while the war next door sends debris onto its border villages and demonstrations onto Chișinău's main square. Visitors are received with hospitality and some surprise.

Moldova's environment is agricultural and its protected ground small: the Codru reserve of 5,177 hectares in the central forest hills, established 1971, and the Orhei National Park of 2013 around Old Orhei are the core, and the country's forests -- codri -- survive as islands in a landscape of vines, sunflowers and maize. The rules are the reserves' and the monasteries': stay on the paths at Old Orhei, cover shoulders and knees in the churches, do not photograph the monks, and do not climb the cliffs at Saharna and Țipova.

The larger responsibility is political. Moldova is a poor country hosting refugees from a war across its border, and the advisories ask visitors to stay away from demonstrations and to check before offering humanitarian help. Money spent here matters: a night in a village guesthouse below Old Orhei, a winery tour bought direct, a driver hired for the day.

Transnistria is not a curiosity to be collected. The UK advises against all travel there, its de facto authorities can refuse entry and demand rubles, and any problem there is beyond consular reach. Respect that.

January–February -- winter at an average of −4 °C, dry and grey; the wineries' cellars are the same 12 degrees they always are, and the capital is at its quietest.

March–April -- the melt and the landslide season the Canadian advisory names; orchards in blossom; the first walkers at Old Orhei.

May–June -- the best months: the hills green, the early-summer rains the heaviest, the monasteries and vineyards at their most photogenic, and no heat yet.

July–August -- long warm summers around 20 °C on average and hotter on the plain; the harvest coming on; dust on the village roads.

September–October -- the grape harvest and the wine festivals, the country's second good season; the Codru forests turning; landslides again with the autumn rains.

November–December -- fog, mud, and the wineries as the reason to come; the Orthodox Christmas on 7 January closes the year.

What a day costs, by how you travel

Year-round relative cost index vs country average

Higher — central Chișinău; the winery estates at harvest

Average — Bălți, Soroca, Orhei

Lower — the villages, Gagauzia, anywhere off the Chișinău roads

The trolleybus fare and the airport transfer are the operator's and the tourism portal's own; winery, monastery and rail prices are not stated because their pages could not be read, and the relative bands are editorial judgment.