Orheiul Vechi

A river in the rock

Just over fifty kilometres north of Chișinău, a small river does something unexpected. The Răut cuts deep into a limestone plateau and winds through it in wide loops. Together, those bends are about seven kilometres long. They enclose two rocky ridges with steep walls. The whole valley forms a kind of amphitheatre, three and a half kilometres across. This is Orheiul Vechi, Old Orhei. It is the most important archaeological landscape in Moldova, and look closely: almost every rock here carries a story.

The fortresses of the Getae

The oldest traces are more than two thousand years old. Between the sixth and the third centuries before Christ, the Getae built fortifications here. They used ditches, earth ramparts and the natural cliffs for defence. On the rocky ridge near the village of Butuceni, archaeologists also found a circular sanctuary. According to the dossier that Moldova submitted to Unesco, it is the oldest of its kind in the Getic world.

A city of the Golden Horde

In the first half of the fourteenth century, a very different world arrived. The Golden Horde, the empire of the Mongol khans, founded the city of Șehr al-Cedid in the valley. It had a palace, a mosque, a caravanserai, a mausoleum and three bathhouses. Around the year thirteen sixty-nine, the Mongols disappeared. On the ruins, the Moldavians built their own town of Orhei, which lasted until about fifteen forty.

Monks in the cliff face

In the fifteenth century, monks began to carve caves into the limestone. Researchers now count about two hundred along the river. The best known cave monastery lies in the cliff of the Peștera ridge. A narrow passage leads to a chapel and twelve small cells. Carved into the rock are inscriptions from the sixteen nineties, when the caves also served as a hiding place. A few monks still live here. They look after the church on top of the hill.

The village of Butuceni

At the foot of the ridge lies the village of Butuceni. In a restored farmhouse, an ethnographic museum shows how people lived here at the end of the nineteenth century. The house was restored with traditional materials and techniques. You can spend the night in the guesthouses of Butuceni and Trebujeni. The national tourism office recommends it too. If you stay, you will see the gorge in the early morning light, before the visitors have arrived.

A landscape as an archive

The reserve was founded in nineteen sixty-eight. Since twenty seventeen, Orheiul Vechi has been on the tentative list for World Heritage. Archaeologists count more than a thousand structures in the landscape, and only some of them have been studied. Getae, Mongols, Moldavian princes and monks each left their own layer here. Each layer tells us who, at that moment, thought the valley worth defending. The river still flows around it, as if guarding the archive it carved out itself.