Wikipedia Deep Dive

Culture of Moldova

12 min read

Somewhere in a museum in Moldova, there's a traditional folk costume that tells a strange story. It looks authentically Moldovan—the embroidered blouse, the woven belt, the colorful patterns passed down through generations. But look at the feet. Instead of the traditional Romanian moccasin called the opinca, you'll find Russian boots.

This small detail reveals something profound about Moldovan culture: it has been shaped, suppressed, celebrated, and subtly altered by wave after wave of foreign influence, yet something essential has survived. The boots are Russian, but the dance is still Moldovan.

A Crossroads of Empires

Moldova sits in one of those unfortunate geographical positions that history loves to fight over. Wedged between Romania to the west and Ukraine to the east, this small country has been a crossroads for empires, armies, and cultures for two thousand years.

The story begins with the Romans. In the second century, Rome colonized the region known as Dacia, planting the seeds of what would become Romanian culture and language. When the Romans withdrew in 271 AD—retreating from the endless pressure of migrating peoples—they left behind something more durable than their roads and fortifications. They left a Latin language that would survive everything that came after.

And quite a lot came after.

The Byzantine Empire extended its influence from Constantinople, that glittering city that straddled Europe and Asia. Slavic peoples began migrating into the region in the sixth century, a gradual infiltration that continued for over a thousand years. The Hungarians arrived. Then came the Ottoman Turks, whose empire would cast a long shadow over the Balkans and beyond.

But the influence wasn't always imposed by conquest. From the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries, the Principality of Moldavia—the medieval state that gives modern Moldova its name—maintained close ties with Poland. Trade routes connected the two, and for a brief period, Moldavia was even a vassal state of the Polish kingdom. Polish merchants, craftsmen, and nobles settled in the region, and several waves of Polish emigrants would continue arriving well into the eighteenth century.

The French Connection

In the nineteenth century, something unexpected happened. Western European culture, particularly French culture, began to transform Moldovan literature and arts. This might seem surprising for a region so far from Paris, but it reflects a broader pattern across Eastern Europe during this period.

The French language had become the language of diplomacy and high culture throughout Europe. Educated Moldovans looked to Paris for intellectual inspiration, just as their counterparts in Russia, Poland, and Romania did. French novels were read in salons. French ideas about politics and philosophy circulated among the educated classes. French artistic styles influenced local painters and writers.

This Western orientation created a cultural tension that would define Moldova for the next two centuries: was it fundamentally European, looking westward toward Paris, Vienna, and eventually Brussels? Or was it part of the Slavic east, tied to Moscow by geography, history, and—increasingly—by force?

The Russian Century

In 1812, the Russian Empire answered that question definitively, at least for the eastern half of the old Principality of Moldavia. The territory we now call Moldova was "liberated" from Ottoman rule—though one might debate whether exchanging one empire for another constitutes liberation—and incorporated into the Russian Empire as the province of Bessarabia.

The name Bessarabia itself tells a story. It comes from the Basarab dynasty that once ruled parts of the region, but under Russian administration, it became synonymous with a particular kind of imperial neglect. By 1918, Bessarabia was one of the least developed and least educated regions in all of Europe. The Russian Empire had extracted resources and loyalty but invested little in return.

Then came the revolutions.

In 1918, amid the chaos following the Russian Revolution, Romania annexed Bessarabia. For twenty-two years, the region was part of Romania, reconnecting with its Latin linguistic and cultural roots. But on the left bank of the Dniester River—the narrow strip of land that would later become the breakaway region of Transnistria—Soviet authorities established the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, a curious entity designed to project Soviet influence westward and to lay claim to Bessarabia.

The Soviet Transformation

World War II brought another violent rupture. In 1940, the Soviet Union annexed Bessarabia under the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, that cynical agreement between Hitler and Stalin that carved up Eastern Europe between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. What followed was catastrophic for Moldovan culture.

Many ethnic Romanian intellectuals fled. Others were killed. Still others were deported to Siberia and Central Asia, part of Stalin's brutal campaign to eliminate potential sources of resistance. The cultural and educational institutions that had developed during the Romanian period were dismantled or transformed beyond recognition.

Soviet authorities pursued a deliberate policy of cultural engineering. They promoted education—literacy rates did improve significantly under Soviet rule—but they systematically eroded Moldova's cultural ties with Romania. The goal was to create a distinct "Moldovan" identity, separate from Romanian identity, that would anchor the region firmly within the Soviet sphere.

The tools of this transformation were both crude and subtle.

The crude tools included censorship, deportation, and the importation of Russian speakers from across the Soviet Union. After the 1960s, urban cultural and scientific institutions were deliberately staffed with Russians and members of other Soviet nationalities. The cities became Russian-speaking, while ethnic Romanians were largely confined to the countryside.

The subtle tools were more insidious. Folk music and dance were actively encouraged—they made excellent propaganda showcasing the happy multicultural Soviet family—but they were carefully modified to obscure their Romanian origins. Hence those Russian boots on the traditional costume. The dance steps remained, but the cultural memory was edited.

The Survival of Folk Tradition

Despite everything, the folk traditions survived. Perhaps because of everything. When a culture is under pressure, people often cling more tightly to their traditions, even when those traditions must be practiced quietly, privately, away from official eyes.

Moldovan folk culture is anchored by ancient ballads that predate all the empires and occupations. "Mioriţa," sometimes translated as "The Little Ewe," is a pastoral poem about a shepherd who learns of a plot to murder him and accepts his fate with a strange, mystical serenity. "Meşterul Manole," or "Master Manole," tells the story of an architect who must sacrifice his wife to complete a monastery—a dark tale about the cost of creation that resonates across Romanian culture.

These ballads are old. How old, exactly, is impossible to say. They were passed down orally for centuries before anyone thought to write them down. They contain echoes of pre-Christian beliefs, of ancient pastoral life in the Carpathian Mountains, of a worldview that predates Rome itself.

Rural Moldovans continued to practice traditional crafts throughout the Soviet period: ceramics, weaving, woodcarving. The folk choir Doina—the name comes from a traditional genre of lyrical folk song—became a national institution, preserving and performing traditional music even as that music was being subtly reshaped to fit Soviet preferences.

The Literary Tradition

Moldova's written literary tradition began in the mid-seventeenth century with religious texts, as was common across Europe. The first books published in the Principality of Moldavia were works of theology and devotion, written in a language that mixed Romanian with Church Slavonic—the liturgical language of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, which played a role similar to Latin in the Catholic West.

Dosoftei, a seventeenth-century metropolitan—the Eastern Orthodox equivalent of an archbishop—founded schools and published prolifically. He helped establish Romanian as a written literary language, translating religious texts and composing original works.

But the most remarkable figure of early Moldovan literature was Dimitrie Cantemir. Born in 1673, Cantemir was a prince, a scholar, and eventually a refugee. He ruled Moldavia briefly, allied himself with Peter the Great of Russia against the Ottoman Turks, and when that gamble failed, fled to Russia where he spent the rest of his life.

In exile, Cantemir wrote. He wrote histories, philosophical treatises, and musical compositions. His masterwork was "Descriptio Moldaviae," a comprehensive description of his homeland published in Berlin around 1714. It was the first thorough geographical, ethnographical, and economic survey of Moldavia—a love letter to a country he could never return to, written in the systematic style of Enlightenment scholarship.

The nineteenth century produced poets and writers who would become foundational figures in Romanian literature. Ion Creangă wrote stories drawn from village life, humorous and earthy and deeply rooted in oral tradition. Mihai Eminescu became Romania's national poet, his romantic verses taught to every schoolchild across the Romanian-speaking world. Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu was a historian, philologist, and polymath who contributed to the scientific study of the Romanian language.

These writers are claimed by both Moldova and Romania, which tells you something about the artificial nature of the boundary between them. They wrote in Romanian, about Romanian life, at a time when the modern nation-states of Romania and Moldova did not yet exist.

The Theater Scene

By the early 1990s, independent Moldova had twelve professional theaters. This might seem like a lot for a country of fewer than three million people, but it reflects the Soviet legacy of heavily subsidized cultural institutions. The USSR invested in theaters, concert halls, and museums as a way of demonstrating the superiority of socialist culture, and independent Moldova inherited this infrastructure.

Most of these theaters performed in Romanian. But the A.P. Chekhov Russian Drama Theater in Chișinău—named after the great Russian playwright—performed solely in Russian, as did the Russian Drama and Comedy Theater in Tiraspol, the capital of the breakaway region of Transnistria. The Licurici Republic Puppet Theater, delightfully, performed in both languages.

Ethnic minority communities maintained their own folklore groups and amateur theaters. The Gagauz, a Turkic-speaking Christian minority concentrated in the south of Moldova, preserved their own distinct traditions. Bulgarians, Ukrainians, and other groups did the same. Moldova's cultural landscape was—and remains—a patchwork of overlapping identities.

The Food

Every culture expresses itself through food, and Moldovan cuisine tells the same story of crossroads and influences that defines the rest of the culture.

The base is Central European: beef, pork, potatoes, cabbage, cheese, grains. These are the foods of cold winters and agricultural plenty, the foods that sustained peasant families through long months when fresh vegetables were impossible to find.

But the specific dishes reveal the neighborhood. Mămăligă is essentially polenta—cornmeal cooked into a thick porridge—and like polenta in Italy, it was historically the food of the poor, the carbohydrate that filled bellies when meat was scarce. Today it's served alongside fancier dishes, a connection to the past.

Ciorbă is a sour soup, and the sourness is key. Moldovan and Romanian cuisine loves fermented flavors—sauerkraut, pickles, sour cream—that add complexity and help preserve food through the winter. A good ciorbă combines meat and vegetables in a broth made tangy with fermented wheat bran or lemon juice, served with polenta or rice.

The dumplings show the Slavic influence. Pelmeni are Russian-style dumplings, small pockets of dough filled with meat and onions. Manti are larger, more Central Asian in origin, filled with meat and vegetables and served with sour cream. Both reflect the long years of Russian and Soviet rule, when these dishes became part of the local repertoire.

Borscht—that iconic beet soup—appears on Moldovan tables just as it does throughout Ukraine, Russia, and Poland. Every family has its own recipe, its own opinion about the proper thickness, the right balance of sweet and sour, whether to add meat or keep it vegetarian.

Sarmale are stuffed cabbage rolls, a dish found throughout the Balkans and Middle East under different names: sarma in Turkey, holubky in Ukraine, gołąbki in Poland. In Moldova, they're typically made with cabbage leaves wrapped around a mixture of rice and meat, often served with sauerkraut and mămăligă.

Wine and Spirits

Moldova is one of the world's most wine-dependent economies—a distinction that sounds more glamorous than it sometimes is. The country has been making wine for thousands of years, and today wine and wine-related products account for a significant portion of exports.

The local brandy is called divin, and if that name sounds familiar, it should. It's derived from "divine," and the brandy is made in the style of Cognac, aged in oak barrels until it achieves a smooth, amber complexity. Soviet-era divin was prized throughout the USSR, and Moldovan winemakers continue to produce it today.

Beer is popular too, as it is throughout the former Soviet space. And local wines range from simple table wines consumed at family dinners to more ambitious bottles seeking recognition in international markets.

The Identity Question

So what is Moldovan culture? Is it a variant of Romanian culture, shaped by the particular experiences of the eastern Romanians who spent a century and a half under Russian and Soviet rule? Or is it something distinct, a unique synthesis of Latin and Slavic elements that has earned the right to be considered on its own terms?

This is not an academic question in Moldova. It's deeply political, tied up with questions about whether the country should eventually reunify with Romania, whether it should pursue closer ties with Russia, or whether it should chart an independent course as a small nation between larger powers.

The folk costume with Russian boots offers one answer. The culture has been altered, sometimes forcibly. Outside influences have left their marks. But the dance continues. The songs are still sung. The mămăligă is still served alongside the sarmale.

What survives is something resilient and adaptive, a culture that has absorbed influences from Rome, Byzantium, the Slavic world, the Ottoman Empire, Poland, France, Russia, and the Soviet Union without losing its essential character. The boots may be Russian, but the rhythm of the dance—and the people dancing—remain stubbornly, persistently, Moldovan.