Chișinău - A City on a Human Scale

Although this is my third visit to Chișinău, it is the first in which I’ve really had a chance to explore the city. At some point, someone told me that I wasn’t missing much, but my experience the past few days tells me that they were wrong. Perhaps it is my nostalgic feelings about Soviet architecture or my love for well used green space, but I actually have found Chișinău to be a quite lovely city on a very reasonably paced human scale. 

Chișinău has been a capital city for only a short time. Before that, it was a provincial center in the Soviet Union, Greater Romania, the Russian Empire, and the Ottoman Empire. The combined effects of an earthquake in the 1940s and the destruction of World War II destroyed much of the pre-1945 city, although a number of public buildings and homes survive in pockets. 

Like most Soviet cities, Chișinău has a great “prospect,” once Prospekt Lenina, now named Bulevardul Ștefan cel Mare și Sfînt (The Boulevard of Steven the Great and Holy). It cuts a wide swath through the central city, lined with a who’s-who of East European architectural styles -- early 20^th century Romanesque commercial buildings, old mansions, Stalinist apartment blocks, hulks of the Brezhnev era, and boxy modern towers. Although I’ve walked it only in the evening, the boulevard is remarkable for its relative lack of traffic, making a pedestrian’s life much easier than in many other cities of the region. The street is lined with shops of every type and size, from tiny used bookstores to the United Colors of Benetton. 

The Orthodox Cathedral and its bell-tower seem to constitute the centerpiece of the city. An unremarkable building of the early nineteenth century, the cathedral reminded me a bit of the Alexander Nevskii monastery in St. Petersburg, with a bit less ornamentation. The scene was made beautiful, however, by the abundant green space, dozens of benches, and sidewalk cafes. People of every age and background milled about, enjoying the beautiful spring weather. 

Perhaps the most interesting site was a beautiful green park just off the main boulevard. The park’s broad paths all converged on a giant nineteenth-century fountain. The paths spreading down the middle of the park were lined with dozens of statues of great Romanian artists, writers, and statesmen, the largest dedicated to the poet Mihai Eminescu. The overall path was dominated, however, by a monument to the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, erected in the 1880s.

In many ways, walking the streets of Chișinău seemed remarkably like stepping back in time. So many things that have disappeared in other cities of the region -- old-fashioned trolleybuses, ornate sprawling wooden park benches, slightly grubby yet interesting stores – are still to be found in Chișinău. While the city is unlikely to become the world’s next tourist hot-spot, it is a remarkably peaceful city and a reminder that urban living need not be fast paced.