Chișinău
Based on Wikipedia: Chișinău
In the spring of 1903, a newspaper called Bessarabetz published a series of inflammatory articles accusing Jews of ritual murder. Within weeks, mobs rampaged through the streets of Chișinău for three days straight, killing 47 people and destroying hundreds of homes and businesses. The violence was so shocking that it prompted Theodore Roosevelt to personally petition Tsar Nicholas II on behalf of the American people. The word "pogrom" entered the English language largely because of what happened in this city.
Today, Chișinău—pronounced roughly "kish-ih-NOW"—is the capital of Moldova, a small nation wedged between Romania and Ukraine that most people would struggle to locate on a map. But this city of over half a million people has witnessed an extraordinary parade of empires, occupations, and reinventions over its nearly six centuries of existence. It has been Ottoman, Russian, Romanian, Soviet, and finally Moldovan. Each regime left its mark on the city's streets, buildings, and collective memory.
A City Built Around a Spring
The origin of the name Chișinău remains genuinely uncertain, which is fitting for a city whose identity has been contested for so long. The most popular theory combines two archaic Romanian words: "chișla," meaning spring or water source, and "nouă," meaning new. The city supposedly grew up around a small spring at what is now the corner of Pușkin and Albișoara streets.
There's a competing theory, though, one with Hungarian roots. A Romanian historian named Ștefan Ciobanu suggested the name might derive from the same source as Chișineu, a town in western Romania near the Hungarian border. The Hungarian version, Kisjenő, breaks down into "kis" (small) and "Jenő"—one of the seven Magyar tribes that swept into the Carpathian Basin in 896 AD. If this theory is correct, the city's name carries an echo of one of the great migrations of the early medieval period.
A third possibility ventures even further east linguistically. A linguist named Kiss Lajos proposed a Cuman origin, from "kešene," meaning grave or burial mound—what archaeologists call a kurgan. This word may trace back through Karachay to the Persian "kāšāne," simply meaning house. The name of a capital city potentially deriving from the word for cemetery has a certain dark poetry to it.
From Monastery Village to Provincial Capital
Chișinău began modestly in 1436 as a monastery village within the Principality of Moldavia. For centuries, it remained a minor settlement while the principality navigated the dangerous waters of Ottoman vassalage. The Ottomans, who had conquered Constantinople in 1453 and dominated southeastern Europe for centuries afterward, allowed Moldavia considerable autonomy—as long as it paid tribute and caused no trouble.
At the dawn of the nineteenth century, Chișinău was still just a small town of about 7,000 people. What transformed it was war.
The Russo-Turkish War of 1806 to 1812 ended with the Ottoman Empire ceding the eastern half of Moldavia to Russia. This territory became known as Bessarabia—a name that would resonate through two centuries of geopolitical upheaval. Suddenly, Chișinău found itself the capital of a new Russian province.
The Russians rebuilt the city according to imperial ambitions. By 1834, an entirely new urban landscape had emerged, characterized by broad, straight boulevards that divided the city into two distinct zones: the older, organically grown settlement with its irregular medieval street pattern, and a gleaming new administrative center built on rational Enlightenment principles.
The construction boom produced landmarks that still define the city. Between 1830 and 1836, the architect Avraam Melnikov built the Nativity Cathedral, which later admirers would describe as a masterpiece of Neoclassical architecture. Its bell tower rose above the city center like an exclamation point marking Russia's arrival. In 1840, a Triumphal Arch designed by Luca Zaushkevich was completed—the kind of monument empires build to announce their permanence.
Rails, War, and the Belle Époque
The railroad changed everything, as it did everywhere. In 1871, a line connected Chișinău to Tiraspol, and two years later to Cornești. The Chișinău-Ungheni-Iași railway, completed in June 1875, was explicitly built to prepare for the next Russo-Turkish War, which came right on schedule in 1877. Chișinău served as the main staging ground for the Russian invasion of Ottoman territory.
One figure stands out from this era of rapid modernization: Mayor Carol Schmidt. The Moldovans still commemorate his contributions to developing the city, which must have been substantial given that monuments to local politicians rarely survive regime changes. Under his watch, the population grew dramatically—from 92,000 in 1862 to nearly 126,000 by 1900.
Much of this growth came from Jewish immigration. Throughout the late nineteenth century, Jews fleeing persecution elsewhere in the Russian Empire or seeking economic opportunity settled in Chișinău. By 1897, Jews comprised 46 percent of the city's population—over 50,000 people. The city had synagogues, Jewish schools, a thriving Yiddish cultural scene. It was becoming one of the major Jewish population centers of the Russian Empire.
Which made what happened next all the more devastating.
The Pogrom That Shocked the World
The word "pogrom" comes from Russian, meaning roughly "to wreak havoc" or "to demolish violently." It entered English primarily through reports of what happened in Chișinău on April 19 and 20, 1903.
The violence had been building for months. Bessarabetz, the only officially sanctioned newspaper in the region, had been publishing virulently anti-Semitic articles. When a Christian boy was found murdered in a nearby town—later determined to have been killed by a relative—the paper blamed Jews and revived the medieval blood libel accusation.
The riot lasted three days. Forty-seven Jews were killed, 92 severely wounded, and 500 more suffered lesser injuries. Hundreds of homes and businesses were ransacked and destroyed. Some accounts put the death toll at 49. Mayor Schmidt, to his credit, publicly condemned the violence and resigned in protest later that year.
The international reaction was unprecedented. In July 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt forwarded a petition to Tsar Nicholas II protesting the violence—a remarkable diplomatic intervention for the era. The pogrom galvanized Jewish communities worldwide and accelerated emigration from the Russian Empire. Many survivors and their descendants ended up in New York, London, and Palestine.
But Chișinău's Jews had not seen the last of mob violence. In August 1905, police opened fire on 3,000 agricultural workers demonstrating in the city. Then, in October 1905—amid the revolutionary ferment that would force Nicholas II to issue his October Manifesto promising civil liberties and a parliament—protests in Chișinău devolved into another pogrom. This time, 19 people died.
Between the Wars: Romanian Chișinău
The Russian Revolution of 1917 and the chaos that followed gave Bessarabia a brief window for self-determination. The region declared independence as the Moldavian Democratic Republic before quickly voting to unite with Romania. Overnight, Chișinău became the second-largest city in an expanded Romanian state.
The interwar period brought genuine development. Romania invested heavily in its new provinces, expanding railroads, building schools, and launching ambitious literacy campaigns. Bessarabia had been a backwater of the Russian Empire; now it received the attention of a national government eager to integrate its population.
In 1927, a monument to Stephen the Great was erected in the city center. Stephen III, who ruled Moldavia from 1457 to 1504, had successfully resisted Ottoman expansion for decades and remains the most celebrated figure in Moldovan national mythology. The sculptor Alexandru Plămădeală created a work that would outlast multiple regime changes.
Higher education arrived in 1933, when the Agricultural Sciences Section of the University of Iași was transferred to Chișinău—the first institution of its kind in Bessarabia. For a region that had been kept deliberately underdeveloped under Russian rule, this represented genuine progress.
The Soviet Chapter Begins
All of it came crashing down on June 28, 1940.
The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, signed the previous August between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, had secretly divided Eastern Europe into spheres of influence. Bessarabia fell into the Soviet sphere. When Stalin demanded the territory, Romania had no choice but to comply. Chișinău became the capital of the newly created Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic.
What followed was systematic terror. Between June 1940 and June 1941, the NKVD—the Soviet secret police, predecessor to the KGB—carried out mass deportations and summary executions. More than 400 people were shot in Chișinău in July 1940 alone. Their bodies were buried in the grounds of the Metropolitan Palace, the Theological Institute, and the backyard of the Italian Consulate, where the NKVD had established its headquarters.
The deportations targeted anyone deemed a potential threat to Soviet power: former politicians, intellectuals, landowners, priests, and their families. Tens of thousands were loaded onto cattle cars and shipped to Siberia, Kazakhstan, or other remote regions of the USSR. Many never returned.
Then nature intervened. On November 10, 1940, an earthquake measuring 7.4 on the Richter scale struck, with its epicenter in the Vrancea Mountains of Romania. Seventy-eight people died in Chișinău, and nearly 2,800 buildings were damaged or destroyed.
The Catastrophe of World War II
In June 1941, Romania joined Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, hoping to recover Bessarabia. Chișinău found itself on the front lines of the largest military conflict in human history.
The city suffered terribly. German aircraft bombed it in June and July 1941. But Moldovan and Romanian sources also assign significant blame to Soviet NKVD destruction battalions, which operated in Chișinău until its capture on July 17, 1941. The Soviets had a policy of leaving nothing useful for the enemy—scorched earth in its most literal form.
For the Jewish population, the German and Romanian occupation meant annihilation. Shortly after taking the city, the occupiers herded Jews into a ghetto in the lower part of town. The main entrance was on what is now called Ierusalim Street. From there, trucks transported victims to the outskirts of the city, where they were shot and dumped into partially dug pits.
An estimated 10,000 Jews were murdered in the initial occupation. Those who survived the first wave were deported to Transnistria, a region between the Dniester and Southern Bug rivers that served as a Romanian-administered killing ground. The Jewish population of Chișinău fell from 11,388 in fall 1941 to just 177 by 1943. The vast majority of the deportees died from execution, starvation, disease, or exposure.
The end of the occupation brought more destruction. As German and Romanian forces retreated in 1944, fighting raged through the city once again. The Red Army captured Chișinău on August 24, 1944, as part of the Second Jassy-Kishinev Offensive—one of the war's most successful Soviet operations.
Soviet Reconstruction and the Khrushchyovka Era
After the war, Bessarabia was firmly reintegrated into the Soviet Union. About 65 percent of its territory became the Moldavian SSR; the remaining 35 percent went to Ukraine. Two more waves of deportations followed—one immediately after reoccupation, another in the mid-1950s.
But the Soviets also rebuilt. Between 1947 and 1949, the architect Alexey Shchusev—who had designed Lenin's Mausoleum in Moscow—led a team developing a master plan for Chișinău's reconstruction. The result would transform the city's character entirely.
The 1950s brought rapid population growth and a corresponding construction boom. Grandiose buildings in Stalinist architecture arose—monumental structures meant to project Soviet power and promise. But the real transformation came under Nikita Khrushchev, who took power after Stalin's death in 1953.
Khrushchev had a housing crisis to solve. Millions of Soviet citizens lived in communal apartments, barracks, or worse. His solution was mass-produced, prefabricated apartment buildings—cheap, fast, and standardized. These became known informally as Khrushchyovkas.
The slogan was "good, cheaper, and built faster." The reality was cramped apartments with low ceilings, tiny kitchens, and minimal amenities, but they were a vast improvement over shared rooms and outdoor toilets. These five-story buildings—the maximum height that didn't require elevators—went up by the thousands across the Soviet Union. In Chișinău, they fundamentally altered the urban landscape.
The most intensive development came after 1971, when the Council of Ministers of the USSR adopted a decision specifically targeting Chișinău's development, committing over one billion rubles from the state budget. By the time Moldova declared independence in 1991, Soviet-era construction accounted for over 74 percent of all housing in the city.
Another devastating earthquake struck on March 4, 1977. Several people were killed, and panic swept the city. But the Soviets pressed on. The Intourist Hotel, a flagship property of the state-owned travel monopoly, was completed in 1978—a brutalist tower that still dominates the skyline.
Independence and Remembrance
Moldova declared independence on August 27, 1991, as the Soviet Union disintegrated. The transition was wrenching. The planned economy collapsed. Living standards plummeted. Hundreds of thousands emigrated to Russia, Italy, Romania, or anywhere that offered work.
But independence also meant confronting history. On April 22, 1993, Chișinău inaugurated the Monument to the Victims of Jewish Ghettos. Designed by architect Simeon Shoihet and sculptor Naum Epelbaum, the memorial centers on a bronze statue of Moses, the biblical prophet who led his people out of slavery. It stands on Ierusalim Street, marking the site where tens of thousands of Jews entered the ghetto on their way to death. The monument serves as a permanent reminder of the Holocaust in a city where, just fifty years earlier, Jews had comprised nearly half the population.
The post-Soviet era brought a large-scale renaming of streets. Soviet heroes gave way to national ones. Communist Party functionaries were replaced by medieval princes and nineteenth-century intellectuals. The process reflected Moldova's effort to construct a national identity distinct from its Soviet past—though not without controversy, given the country's mixed Romanian and Russian heritage.
The City Today
Modern Chișinău is a city of contrasts. Soviet-era apartment blocks stretch to the horizon, interrupted by Ottoman-era churches, Russian Imperial architecture, and occasional glass-and-steel newcomers. The central railway station, built in Russian Imperial style, still offers direct service to Romania—a link to the European Union that has taken on new significance.
The architectural heritage is remarkably diverse. Swiss-Italian-Russian architect Alexander Bernardazzi designed many of the city's most beautiful buildings in the late nineteenth century, including City Hall and the churches of Saint Theodore and Saint Panteleimon. The Nativity Cathedral, that Neoclassical masterpiece from the 1830s, anchors the city center. Postwar Stalinist and Brutalist buildings provide their own austere grandeur.
The city hosts Moldova's major cultural institutions: the National Museum of Fine Arts, Moldova State University, the Brancusi Gallery, and the National Museum of History with its collection of over 236,000 objects. In the northern part of town, bustling markets retain an almost medieval character—and nearby stands the house where Alexander Pushkin, Russia's greatest poet, lived during his exile from Tsar Alexander I. It's now a museum.
Wine remains central to Moldovan identity, as it has been for at least five thousand years. Archaeological evidence suggests winemaking in the region dates to 3000 BCE. Every October, Chișinău hosts the national wine festival, a celebration that connects the modern capital to traditions far older than any of the empires that have claimed it.
Between Europe and the East
Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 thrust Moldova into an uncomfortable spotlight. The country shares a long border with Ukraine and hosts a breakaway Russian-backed territory called Transnistria. For a nation of fewer than three million people—economically among Europe's poorest—the stakes could not be higher.
Moldova's response has been remarkable. Despite its poverty, the country allowed more than 600,000 Ukrainian refugees to cross its border. Over 100,000 have remained, many in Chișinău. For a city of just over half a million, absorbing such numbers represents an extraordinary act of solidarity.
On May 21, 2023, tens of thousands gathered in Chișinău for what was called the European Moldova National Assembly—a massive rally supporting the country's bid for European Union membership. Police estimated 75,000 demonstrators, organized by President Maia Sandu. The crowd filled the main square and surrounding streets, waving EU flags alongside Moldovan ones.
Later that month, Chișinău hosted a major international summit of European leaders. The Netherlands opened a new embassy in the city in April 2023. These diplomatic developments signal that Moldova—and its capital—have become significant in ways that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.
A City of Survivors
Nearly a third of Moldova's entire population lives in the Chișinău metropolitan area. The city is the country's economic engine, its main transport hub, its window to the world. The population of the municipality—the city proper plus surrounding communities—exceeds 720,000.
In September 2022, the country's first Christian university opened in Chișinău, supported by Scandinavian broadcasters and run in cooperation with Southeastern University in Florida. The previous November, the Court of Appeal ruled that the international airport would return to state ownership after years of private management. The city continues to evolve, as it has for nearly six centuries.
What's striking about Chișinău is not any single monument or building but the accumulation of layers—Ottoman, Russian Imperial, Romanian, Soviet, and now independent Moldovan. Each regime tried to remake the city in its image. Each left traces that subsequent rulers couldn't entirely erase.
The city that began as a monastery village around a spring, that became a Russian provincial capital, that witnessed some of the worst anti-Jewish violence in European history, that was bombed and rebuilt and bombed again, that spent half a century as a Soviet republic's showcase—that city still stands. Its residents still gather in the markets, worship in the churches and synagogues that survived, walk the broad Russian boulevards past the Brutalist apartment blocks.
Chișinău is a city of survivors. Given everything it has endured, perhaps that's the most important thing to say about it.