The history of Moldova, from Cucuteni to Brussels

IFrom Cucuteni to the Golden Horde

Long before anyone spoke of Moldova, the land between the Carpathians and the Dniester was home to farmers who ranked among the most skilled potters of the European Neolithic. The Cucuteni-Trypillia culture, named after sites in Romania and Ukraine, flourished roughly between 5500 and 2750 BC. Its settlements sometimes numbered hundreds of houses, which were burned down at intervals for reasons that remain unclear. What survives is pottery painted with spirals in red, white and black, which you will come across in Moldovan and Romanian museums.

In the last millennium BC this was the land of Thracian tribes whom the Greeks called Getae and the Romans Dacians. At Butuceni, in the bend of the Răut near Orheiul Vechi, lie the remains of a Getic fortress. When Emperor Trajan conquered the Dacian kingdom in AD 106, most of present-day Moldova stayed outside the province proper, but Roman influence reached as far as the Black Sea coast. The earthen ramparts in the south are popularly known as Valul lui Traian, Trajan's Wall; who actually built them, and when, is still debated among archaeologists.

After the Romans, one people after another crossed the steppe for centuries: Goths, Huns, Slavs, Pechenegs and Cumans. From 1241 the area was under Mongol and later Tatar rule. In the 14th century a Golden Horde town stood near Orheiul Vechi, and archaeologists have uncovered its foundations. These early layers explain why the landscape of central Moldova is dotted with burial mounds, earthworks and the remains of fortresses.

IIThe Principality of Moldavia (1359-1812)

The Principality of Moldavia came into being in 1359, when Bogdan I broke away from Hungarian rule and founded a state of his own east of the Carpathians. The name comes from the river Moldova, in present-day Romania, which is why the early capitals, Siret and later Suceava, lie in Romania today. The territory of the present republic formed the eastern half of the principality, up to the Dniester.

The best-known ruler is Ștefan cel Mare (Stephen the Great), who reigned from 1457 to 1504. In 1475 he defeated a much larger Ottoman army at Vaslui, one of the most striking European victories over the sultan in that century. Even so, in 1484 he lost the port towns of Chilia and Cetatea Albă to the Ottomans and their Crimean Tatar allies. During his reign dozens of stone churches and monasteries went up in a distinctive Moldavian style. The Romanian Orthodox Church canonised him in 1992; his statue, cross in hand, stands at the entrance to the park in Chișinău that bears his name.

After Ștefan's death the Ottoman grip tightened. In 1538 Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent invaded the country. The fortress of Tighina became an Ottoman stronghold under the name Bender, and Moldavia became a vassal state paying annual tribute. The principality kept its own princes, its own church and its own nobility, but Istanbul had a say in who sat on the throne.

One attempt to break free came from Dimitrie Cantemir, prince in 1710-1711, who formed an alliance with Tsar Peter the Great. After the defeat of the Russian-Moldavian army on the Prut in 1711 he fled to Russia, where he wrote the Descriptio Moldaviae, the first detailed account of the country. For the following century the sultan mostly appointed Greek princes from the Phanar district of Istanbul, known as the Phanariots. Between 1711 and 1812 Russian armies occupied Moldavia five times.

IIIBessarabia under the tsars (1812-1917)

Under the Treaty of Bucharest of 28 May 1812, the Ottoman Empire ceded the eastern half of Moldavia, the land between the Prut and the Dniester, to Russia. St Petersburg named the new territory Bessarabia, a name that had originally applied only to the south. In 1859 the western part of the principality joined Wallachia to form the state that would later be called Romania. From then on, the two halves of old Moldavia went their separate ways.

At first the tsarist empire granted the province a degree of autonomy, but it soon took it back. Romanian disappeared from schools and public offices in 1834, and in 1854 Russian became the official language. In the 1897 census only 15.4% of the population could read and write, and among Moldavians just 6%.

At the same time the population changed. Russia offered land to settlers in the sparsely populated south: Germans, Bulgarians and Gagauz, a Turkic-speaking Orthodox people who settled in Comrat and elsewhere between 1820 and 1846. Ukrainians, Russians and Jews moved to the province too. Chișinău grew from a market town into a provincial capital with straight streets, a cathedral (1836) and a triumphal arch (1840). The Russian poet Alexander Pushkin spent his exile there between 1820 and 1823.

The darker side came to light in 1903. On Easter Sunday a pogrom broke out in Chișinău, then known as Kishinev, in which 49 Jews were killed and hundreds injured. The Hebrew poet Chaim Nachman Bialik wrote In the City of Slaughter about it, and the events made headlines around the world. After the Russian revolution of 1905 a modest Moldavian national movement took shape, with the lawyer and writer Constantin Stere among its pioneers.

IVUnion with Romania and a republic across the Dniester (1917-1940)

The collapse of the tsarist empire in 1917 opened a brief window. On 15 December 1917 a regional council, the Sfatul Țării, proclaimed an autonomous Moldavian Democratic Republic within a Russian federation. After a short Bolshevik occupation of Chișinău and the arrival of Romanian troops, independence followed on 6 February 1918. On 9 April 1918 (27 March in the old calendar) the council voted by 86 to 3, with 36 abstentions, for a conditional union with Romania. In December 1918 the conditions were dropped.

The Treaty of Paris of 28 October 1920 recognised the union, but Japan never ratified it and Moscow refused to accept the new border. Between the wars Bessarabia was a largely agricultural province of Romania, with land reform, new schools and Romanian as the language of education and administration.

The Soviet Union responded in its own way. In 1924 it set up a Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic on the left bank of the Dniester, within Soviet Ukraine, with Balta as its capital and, from 1929, Tiraspol. There a separate 'Moldavian' language in Cyrillic script was promoted as a counterweight to Romanian. That script was in use in 1924-1932 and again from 1938. This autonomous republic is one of the historical roots of present-day Transnistria.

VWar, Holocaust and deportations (1940-1953)

The secret protocol to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 assigned Bessarabia to the Soviet sphere of influence. After an ultimatum, the Red Army marched in on 28 June 1940. On 2 August 1940 the Moldavian SSR was created from the central part of Bessarabia and a strip of the old autonomous republic on the left bank. The north and south of Bessarabia went to Soviet Ukraine, which is why the old ports on the Danube and the Black Sea are in Ukraine today.

The first mass deportation came on the night of 12 to 13 June 1941, when some 19,000 people were sent to the east of the Soviet Union. Shortly afterwards Germany and Romania attacked the Soviet Union, and in July 1941 Bessarabia came under Romanian rule once more. For the Jewish population this meant the Holocaust. In Chișinău more than 11,000 people were confined to a ghetto, and tens of thousands of Jews from Bessarabia were deported to camps in Transnistria, the area between the Dniester and the Southern Bug that Romania then governed. Yad Vashem has recorded the names of 60,732 murdered Bessarabian Jews.

In August 1944 the Red Army retook the region in the Iași-Chișinău offensive. The war was followed by drought, compulsory grain deliveries and a famine in 1946-1947 that, by common estimates, killed at least 115,000 peasants. On the night of 5 to 6 July 1949 the secret police deported around 35,000 people, mostly farming families branded as kulaks (Europa Liberă). The operation took 4,000 lorries and 1,570 cattle wagons. A third wave in 1951 targeted mainly religious groups. That cleared the way for the collectivisation of agriculture.

VISoviet republic and the language movement (1953-1991)

After Stalin, the Moldavian SSR became an agricultural republic that supplied wine, tobacco, fruit and vegetables to the whole Soviet Union. Leonid Brezhnev, later party leader in Moscow, was its first party secretary from 1950 to 1952. Heavy industry and the large power station ended up mainly on the left bank of the Dniester, while Russian-speaking specialists and workers moved to the cities. Chișinău, badly damaged in the war, was rebuilt with broad avenues, housing blocks and modernist landmarks.

Officially there was a separate Moldavian nation with its own language in Cyrillic script; Russian was the language of careers and administration. Under Gorbachev's perestroika, resistance grew. Writers and intellectuals demanded recognition that Moldavian and Romanian are one and the same language, and a return to the Latin alphabet. On 27 August 1989 hundreds of thousands of people gathered in Chișinău for the Marea Adunare Națională, the Great National Assembly. On 31 August 1989 the republic's parliament made Moldavian in Latin script the state language. That day is still celebrated every year as Limba noastră, 'our language'.

In the Russian-speaking towns on the left bank and in the Gagauz south, the language law was seen as a threat. Strikes and counter-movements followed. In August 1990 Comrat proclaimed a Gagauz republic, and on 2 September 1990 Tiraspol followed with a Transnistrian Moldavian Soviet Republic. Chișinău recognised neither. After the failed coup in Moscow, Moldova declared independence on 27 August 1991; Mircea Snegur became its first president.

VIITransnistria and Gagauzia: the 1990s

The tensions on the left bank escalated into armed conflict. The first deaths came in November 1990 in Dubăsari. The war is officially dated from 2 March 1992, the day Moldova joined the United Nations. The bloodiest fighting took place in June 1992 over Bender (Tighina), a town on the right bank that the separatists were determined to hold. The Russian 14th Army, stationed in the region, backed the separatists with weapons and men, and its artillery fire tipped the balance in early July.

On 21 July 1992 Presidents Boris Yeltsin and Mircea Snegur signed a ceasefire in Moscow. A peacekeeping force of Russian, Moldovan and Transnistrian battalions was placed under a joint control commission. In all, an estimated 1,000 or so people were killed (Veridica). Since then Transnistria has been a de facto state recognised by no UN member, with its own currency, the Transnistrian rouble, its own border controls and Russian troops on its territory. Talks with the OSCE as mediator, Russia and Ukraine as mediating countries and the EU and the United States as observers have failed to resolve the conflict. If you want to visit the region, check the latest travel advice from the Belgian FPS Foreign Affairs before you go.

The south took a different course. The constitution of 29 July 1994 declared Moldova permanently neutral and named the state language 'Moldovan'; that same year Alexei Mateevici's poem Limba noastră became the national anthem. On 23 December 1994 parliament passed the law on the special status of Gagauzia. After a referendum in 1995 the autonomous territorial unit of Gagauzia (Gagauz Yeri) was established, with Comrat as its capital, its own people's assembly and a directly elected governor, the başkan. The model is often cited as a peaceful settlement of an ethnic conflict, although relations between Comrat and Chișinău remain tense. Meanwhile the economy shrank sharply in the 1990s and a wave of emigration began whose effects are still felt today.

VIIIBetween Moscow and Brussels (2001-2026)

In 2001 the Party of Communists won 71 of the 101 seats and Vladimir Voronin became president. His government first sought closer ties with Russia, but in 2003 it rejected a Russian plan to federalise the country and then turned cautiously towards the European Union. After the elections of April 2009, protests in Chișinău turned into riots and the storming of parliament. In early elections in July 2009 a coalition of pro-European parties came to power.

Moldova signed an association agreement with the EU, including a free trade area, on 27 June 2014, and since 28 April 2014 Moldovans with a biometric passport have been able to travel to the Schengen area without a visa. That same year around a billion dollars vanished from three Moldovan banks, a fraud case that badly shook public trust in politics.

In 2020 Maia Sandu was elected president, and her party, PAS, won an absolute majority in 2021. After Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Moldova applied for EU membership on 3 March 2022. It became a candidate country on 23 June 2022, and accession negotiations formally opened in Luxembourg on 25 June 2024. In March 2023 parliament replaced the term 'Moldovan language' with 'Romanian language' in all legislation, including the constitution.

On 20 October 2024, 50.35% of voters in a referendum approved a constitutional amendment that enshrines EU accession as a strategic goal. Sandu was re-elected on 3 November 2024 with 55.35% of the vote in the second round. Both votes were overshadowed by allegations of Russian interference. In the parliamentary elections of 28 September 2025, PAS kept its majority with 55 of the 101 seats.

In 2026 the negotiations properly got under way. On 15 June 2026 the EU opened the first cluster in Luxembourg, Fundamentals, which covers the rule of law, justice and fundamental rights among other areas. The external relations cluster followed on 14 July 2026. That brought the total to 7 of the 33 chapters open, with none yet closed (Radio Moldova, July 2026). The government is aiming to wrap up the negotiations in 2028; observers see accession around 2030 as ambitious but not impossible.

IXWhere to see the history

Moldova has few grand monuments, but it does have places where the layers of its history visibly sit on top of one another. A selection, in roughly chronological order:

• Orheiul Vechi: a Getic fortress, the remains of a Golden Horde town and a cave monastery in the limestone cliff above the Răut.
• Cetatea Soroca: the round fortress on the Dniester, a link in the defences of the medieval principality.
• Cetatea Tighina in Bender: an Ottoman fortress and later a Russian stronghold, now on territory controlled by Transnistria.
• Mănăstirea Căpriana: one of the oldest monasteries in the country, first mentioned in 1429.
• Muzeul Național de Istorie a Moldovei in Chișinău: from prehistoric pottery to the Soviet period.
• Complexul Memorial Eternitate in Chișinău: a Soviet memorial to those who fell in the Second World War.

To understand the Holocaust and the deportations better, also visit the old Jewish cemetery in Chișinău and the memorial to the deportees by the railway station. Together these places show how a single stretch of land went from principality to province, Soviet republic and finally independent state over six centuries.