A Trip To Moldova
Visiting the last agrarian society in Europe
On not much more than a whim I spent a week in Moldova, which turned out to be a jolly good idea indeed. It's a fabulous country with kind and helpful people. I was travelling with a fluent Russian speaker without whom communication might have been much harder. We found Russian speakers everywhere we went. Signs are bilingual with Moldovan in latin script. If you speak Romanian or Italian you'll probably we able to work most of them out. We didn't hear much English outside of high end restaurants and tourist attractions, which we mostly avoided.
Moldova is very rural. Chisinau airport is surrounded by farmland; stepping off the jet we found ourselves on a concrete strip in the middle of a vast wheat field. A few minutes later, following a misunderstanding with google maps we were pulling a U-turn under a highway bridge on a level crossing surrounded by seven dairy cows who were being walked home! The land is excellent and productive; when Moldova was an independent socialist republic within the Soviet Union its fruit and vegetables fed everyone from Vladivostok to Vilnius. The collapse of the USSR has not been kind to Moldova, which now imports milk from Ukraine and tomatoes from Turkey. It's main export is people; some 1,500,000 Moldovans work in Western Europe or the United States. That leaves just 2,500,000 living in country the size of Belgium.
Half a million of those live in the Chisinau, the capital. The Soviet style architecture and layout comprises 15 to 20 floor towers with wide, wide boulevards between them. On either side of the main roads are five or six floor blocks of flats perhaps 300 metres long. The ground floors are all shops, restaurants or bars. It seems you're never more than 100 metres from a chemist, supermarket, bank, coffee bar or money change. There are no queues anywhere for anything. This may in part be due to the depopulation and in part due to over-provision. Pretty much everything is open early to late so no shop or restuaraunt is full, or anything like it. Quite how they make a profit is a mystery. Chisinau has many parks and open spaces; it would be difficult to find an apartment that didn't have a view of some trees. Most can probably see entire forests and the air quality seems excellent.
The air quality is boosted by the lack of traffic. Trolley busses abound, as do busses of various sorts. The cars are mostly the lower end of the spectrum – with Range Rovers and German SUVs being mostly Ukrainian, which tells a story. Some streets, mostly those near the government buildings and the EU mission, are in good condition. The rest vary, with plenty of potholes. One feature is the plethora of pedestrian crossings and the fearlessness of pedestrians in exerting their right of way. Moldovans drive with Italian panache but Teutonic adherence to rules (except speed). The road layouts have exits both ways, turning right on a red is permitted and every crossroads has pedestrian crossings on all exits. If you are driving you need your wits about you – although most Moldovans also manage to text while negotiating the traffic. This probably explains the frequent appearance of ambulances, especially in rush hour.
The food is excellent and cheap – two courses for two with a couple of beers is unlikely to cost more than about £20 to £30. Most of the restaurants seem to be chains and the cooking is all Moldovan, although the chain feel makes it feel less authentic, although everyone eating in the restaurants were Moldovan. There are very few tourists in Moldova.
Despite the abundant, cheap and high quality food and wine most Moldovans are thin; I saw no obese children, who tend to dine out with their parents in the Mediterranean way. The streets are clean and the pavements immaculate. The major routes are lined with trees including walnuts, chestnuts, limes and poplars. Street lighting is at least adequate and although we were far from the city centre we felt safe. The conductresses on the trolley busses work with a large handful of notes in plain view, something I can't imagine happening in London.
Another thing that wouldn't happen in London is being able to walk up to the Houses of Parliament and only gently challenged by a policeman when you got to the door. Similarly there was none of the overt policing of government buildings or anywhere else really. Some of the police are armed, none seem to wear body armour or cameras. I managed to collect a speeding fine and the policeman was far politer than an American, German or British one.
Outside of Chisinau the roads are of varying quality. We found a fabulous new one built to a Franco-German specification at the Romanian border. It went about halfway to Chisinau and then petered out into the more usual sort – narrower with occasional pothole outbreaks. There are almost no true dual carriageways, although some petrol stations are sited as an island between lanes. Even major roads still have pedestrian crossings, which may or may not be marked but all have a speed limit of 30 km/h. Speed limit signs are not lit and few and far between. Following the locals is a sound policy – until you find a speed trap, which are frequent.
Navigating is interesting. Google maps doesn't always have the latest roads and its route selection algorithm doesn't distinguish between paved roads and dirt tracks (which rapidly turn into slippy mud when it rains). Fortunately our Dacia came with four wheel drive, which we used often. The countryside is very sparsely populated. Were one to get stuck on a remote track one could be there for a while; discretion is definitely the better part of valour.
We passed countless abandoned collective farms. Aparently post the collapse of the Soviet Union they were all broken up, with the land given to the workers on the basis of how long they had worked there. 35 years on and one generation later it's all a bit of a mess. While there are some vast fields of grain, maize and sunflowers and many combine harvester dealers there are aslo peasant farmers. Tethered dairy cows are the norm, the largest dairy herd I saw was the seven strong one I met at the airport. Goats seem more common than sheep – either tethered or in flocks of about ten. I saw no pigs, even in the most rural of villages.
Villages comprise a few streets of houses of varying size , typically set in about half an acre of ground. Most of this half acre is productive fruit and vegetable gardens, with vines for wine – Moldovan wine is abundant and excellent. And roses – Moldova has a thing about roses and they are everywhere – roadside, municipal flowerbeds, lawns, vinyards and gardens – where they peek over the fences. Almost all rural houses are fenced solidly, with only trees, tall plants and rooflines giving a hint as to contents. The state of repair varies, few are new. Indeed one feature of both Chisinau and the countryside is the range of abandoned building projects; presumably the combination of covid, depopulation and interest rates has done for them.
History and world events have not been kind to Moldova. Today it is bounded by two rivers, with breakaway Transnistria on the eastern bank of one. Somehow it has no direct access to the Black Sea as a 3 kilometre wide strip of Ukraine obstructs it. The western river boundary runs unto the Danube, so small ships can reach the southern tip of the country. Moldova is in the process of applying for membership of the EU – which is splashing cash about wildly. There is a referendum on accession later this year. Whether access to the Schengen countries, which will make working abroad easier for the few who can't claim Romanian ancestry (or don’t have the 2,000 Euros that a fake Romanian passport costs) will be balanced by EU investment creating well paid employment is an open question. Certainly EU working time and safety directives will be a shock for many working Moldovans.
The other organisation throwing cash about is the Orthodox church, which is working hard at restoring monasteries and convents across the country – and there are lots of them. Whether lavishing gold leaf on roofs and internal iconography is the best use of funds is for Moldovans, the results are spectacular.
Overall I think Moldova is a lovely place and one of great potential and opportunity. The world, and Europe, must eat and Moldova is a great place to grow stuff. There are inevitably some politically made problems to solve – but they're not alone in that. For sure I will return.