Chișinău Audio Tour: Echoes of Legends and Landmarks

On your right, look for a two-and-a-half-story facade with a sandstone ground floor, red brick upper walls, and a central pyramidal roof crowned by an airy little pavilion.

This building began in nineteen oh one as a girls’ gymnasium, a secondary school, founded under the patronage of Princess Natalia Dadiani. Before that, older buildings stood on this site until the state councilor Mitrofan Purișkevici sold the property to the school’s governing council in her name. That detail matters... because this place was not just another school. It was a statement that education for girls deserved a prominent address, serious architecture, and public dignity.

The architect, Alexandru Bernardazzi, gave it exactly that. He designed a facade that blends styles rather than obeying just one. You can see the mix in the rough horizontal stonework at street level, the warmer brick above, and the pointed Gothic touches borrowed from Florence in Italy. The main entrance does not shout for attention. Instead, a shaped arch and the balcony above it draw your eye upward, almost as if the building wants to lift you from the street into learning.

Look at the front as a whole and you can feel its discipline. The composition is symmetrical, with a large central section that projects forward and side sections balancing it. The windows change shape from one opening to the next, and some of their stone frames create a zigzag edge that gives the wall a quiet pulse. Near the projecting sections, sculpted figures once occupied arched niches, and above, a heavy decorative band of linked arches runs along the top like a final, deliberate sentence.

Natalia Dadiani led the school until her death in nineteen oh three. The gymnasium stayed here until the Second World War, when the upper part of the building suffered damage. After that, the building changed roles with the century’s shifting powers. It housed the central committee of the Communist Party of the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic until nineteen sixty-four. Then it became the Palace of Pioneers and Students, while the left wing hosted the republican Science Society. In nineteen seventy-six, officials remade the interior as a museum of Communist Party history. Few buildings reveal political change so plainly.

If the structure feels especially balanced, there is a reason: to enlarge the exhibition space, builders later added the right-side wing as a two-level mirror to the left. Since restoration, helped by a one million euro grant from the Romanian government in two thousand fourteen, the building reopened on the fourth of November, two thousand sixteen as the National Museum of Art of Moldova.

If you plan to return inside, the museum generally opens Monday through Friday from eight AM to five PM and closes on weekends.

This facade holds more than style; it holds the memory of changing ideas about power, education, and culture.

Take a last look at the brick, stone, and towered center... and when you are ready, we can continue to Saint Panteleimon Church.

On your right, look for a compact church of striped light and dark stone, crowned with rounded domes, with red brick stitched into the facade as a vivid decorative pattern.

Saint Panteleimon Church holds more than faith inside its walls... it holds a family memory and a whole community’s sense of home. In eighteen ninety-one, the architect Alexandru Bernardazzi designed it for the Greek community of Chișinău, and the brothers Iannis, also called Ivan, and Victor Sinadino gave the project its force and funding. They chose Saint Panteleimon as the church’s protector to honor their father, Pantelimon I. Sinadino, whose name day saint was Pantelimon.

What makes this church so striking is how deliberately it looks elsewhere for inspiration. The plan forms a Greek cross, which means all four arms are equal in length, unlike the longer body of many churches. The eastern arm holds the altar apse, the rounded sacred end of the church, while the western arm carries the bell tower. Above the center, four intersecting arches lift an octagonal dome... a structural idea with Armenian roots. Outside, the walls alternate bands of pale and darker stone, and Bernardazzi sharpened the effect with red brick details, arched window openings, and those full, lively towers with cornices that ripple like fabric.

Even the fence matters here: forged iron on a stone base, broken by posts topped with lion heads. This church was never ordinary; newspapers of the time praised it as one of the finest artistic works of its kind in the Russian Empire.

It still feels like a small, confident statement of identity in stone.

Take a moment here, and when you’re ready, we can continue to the next stop.

On your right, look for a two-story masonry mansion with a projecting central section, a triangular pediment, and a stone parapet lined with balusters.

This is the Rîșcanu-Derojinschi Urban Mansion, one of Chișinău’s nationally significant architectural monuments, standing here on București Street in the historic center. It carries the dignity of a noble house... and the scars of a long political life.

In the eighteen seventies, Gheorghe Rîșcanu-Derojinschi, the marshal of the Bessarabian nobility, commissioned architect Alexandru Bernardazzi to design it. He and his wife Ecaterina lived here; she came from an influential family, the daughter of the boyar Alexandru Russo and Zoia Catargi. Bernardazzi gave them a house meant to impress. The façade was symmetrical, with a central section that pushed forward slightly - architects call that a projection - crowned by a triangular pediment. The main entrance faced București Street through an arched loggia, a covered porch with open arches, supported by heavy pillars and reached by broad steps. Above the ground floor’s carved, block-like finish, the upper level carried baroque-style window frames, Corinthian pilasters - flat decorative columns - and a cornice edged with small tooth-like details.

After Bessarabia united with Romania, the family sold the house in nineteen twenty to a wealthy Jewish buyer named Kogan for one million five hundred thousand lei, a fortune at the time, roughly the value of several million in today’s money. Then power changed again. In nineteen fifty-five, Soviet authorities reshaped the mansion, adding a wing with an amphitheater-style hall for meetings of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. Later, the Society “Știința,” the Philharmonic administration, the Foreign Ministry’s diplomatic service, and the Chamber of Commerce all passed through these rooms.

The hardest chapter came in the twenty-first century. After a controversial sale in two thousand ten, developers stripped out the interior walls and inserted concrete pillars while planning a massive hotel beside and behind the old structure. What survives most clearly now is the outer shell... a beautiful façade still arguing for memory.

This mansion reminds Chișinău how easily heritage can be preserved in name and altered in substance.

Take a last look, and when you’re ready, we can continue to the next stop.

On your right, look for the pale masonry building that wraps the corner in an angular shape, with rusticated stonework at street level and a chamfered entrance marked by columns and a balcony.

This building carries a very specific ambition: to give girls a serious education in a city that had long reserved that promise for boys. The story began on the eighth of March, eighteen sixty-four, when Liubovi Alexandrovna Beliugova founded a private girls' gymnasium - a full secondary school, not just a finishing school. After that first chapter, the school changed in eighteen seventy-one from a private institution into a public one under the Bessarabian zemstvo, the elected provincial council of the Russian Empire.

One of the strongest voices here was Matilda Lazo, who led the school from eighteen seventy-two to eighteen eighty-five. She fought for girls to study at the same level as boys, and she succeeded in opening an eighth class with a pedagogical profile, which meant girls could train as future teachers. That sounds simple now... but at the time, it was a direct claim on public life.

In March of eighteen eighty, the zemstvo bought this empty corner plot at what were then Gubernială and Podoliei Streets. On the twenty-fourth of May, eighteen eighty-one, they laid the foundation stone. G-F Lonsky drew the project and budget, and the architect Kurkovsky supervised the work until completion on the third of August, eighteen eighty-two.

The architecture makes that ambition visible. The main entrance sits on the cut corner, almost like the building turns toward the city and introduces itself. Two Doric columns - the plain, sturdy classical kind - hold the balcony above. Higher up, a loggia, an open recessed gallery, stands behind four Ionic columns with their curled capitals. Across the facade, you can spot round-arched windows, pilasters between them, and keystones above the arches. The ground floor looks heavier because of its rustication, those deep-cut blocks that give it weight, while the upper floor is smoother and more refined. It is disciplined, orderly, and confident... exactly the image a modern school wanted.

History did not leave it alone. During the First World War, the building served as a military infirmary in nineteen fifteen during the school break. Then, in nineteen seventeen and nineteen eighteen, White Guard troops from the Odessa military district occupied it, and lessons stopped altogether.

Later, the school became the Commercial Girls' Lyceum. In May of nineteen twenty, Queen Maria and Princess Elisabeta visited, and not long after, officials allowed the institution to carry the name Regina Maria on its frontispiece. After another wartime rupture, staff and pupils evacuated to Craiova under director Elena Apostol. Then came new names, new systems, and new rulers: Moldavian Secondary School Number One, then a mixed school after merging with a boys' school in nineteen fifty-three, then a Soviet-era renaming for Grigori Kotovski.

Today, the building belongs to the Gheorghe Asachi Lyceum, and it remains protected as a monument of national importance. A restoration project won approval in two thousand eighteen, a reminder that Chișinău still sees this place as worth repairing, not just remembering.

This former gymnasium matters because it turned education into a public argument about who deserved a future.

Take one more look at the facade, and when you're ready, we can continue on to Doctor Tumarkin's former hydrotherapy clinic.

Look for the pale masonry corner villa, low and rectangular, with an arched central bay and two winged stone dragons tucked above the former entrance.

This place carries two histories at once... the story of a private home, and the story of a medical experiment in modern life. In eighteen seventy-eight, a provincial secretary named Nicolai Ivanovich Kushkovski bought this plot at public auction from the city authorities. Over the next years, from eighteen seventy-nine to eighteen ninety-four, he shaped the corner with a one-story house over a basement, modest in scale but carefully arranged with six rooms.

Then, in eighteen ninety-seven, Doctor Lazar Tumarkin stepped in and changed the meaning of the site. Between eighteen ninety-eight and nineteen oh two, he built a hydrotherapy clinic here. Hydrotherapy simply means treatment with water: baths, showers, pressure, temperature, all used as medicine. At the turn of the century, that felt strikingly modern. Water promised discipline, recovery, and scientific control over the body. People considered Tumarkin’s clinic one of the most developed in the southern Russian Empire, which tells you how ambitious this address once was. By nineteen oh three, the recorded owners were Matei and Lazar Tumarkin.

The villa in front still hints at that ambition. Its design mixes styles in an eclectic way, borrowing from classical architecture and layering on ornament. You can see wall sections that push slightly forward, triangular crowns above some windows, and those remarkable winged dragons in stone above the former grand entrance. The entrance itself no longer functions as it once did; it was replaced by a window. That small change says a great deal. Buildings survive, but they rarely remain pure.

And this one changed again and again. The clinic building in the courtyard went through reconstruction in the interwar years, which altered both its structure and its main facade. The property also suffered destruction during the Second World War. Later restorations reshaped the villa in an Art Nouveau style, the curving early twentieth-century style, even though that differed sharply from the original design. In the nineteen nineties, another expansion damaged the old clinic further: workers removed decorative stonework and added a heavy roof level, with false brackets that made the facade feel strained rather than graceful.

Today the whole complex stands protected as a monument of national importance, part of Chisinau’s historic core, and restoration work on the villa resumed in two thousand fourteen under official heritage approval.

What you see, then, is not one frozen moment, but a layered record of care, damage, fashion, and repair.

Here, medicine and memory share the same walls.

Take one more look at those dragons, and when you’re ready, we can continue to the next stop.

On your left, look for the long stone one-story façade with a recessed central entrance, repeated round-arched windows, and a triangular pediment rising over the middle.

This building carries more than one life inside it. It began as an orphanage. In eighteen forty-two, the city council set aside a large plot here for Chișinău’s orphanage, and by the middle of the nineteenth century the main block had taken shape. Builders raised the central building between eighteen fifty-four and eighteen fifty-seven, and they opened it in eighteen fifty-six. The plan was careful and practical: a long corridor ran through the whole structure, and on either side stood classrooms, work rooms for training through labor, and dormitories for fifteen boys and fifteen girls, their windows facing the inner yard.

There is something moving in that design. This was not only a shelter. It was an attempt to build order, education, and usefulness into a child’s daily life. Behind the buildings, the orphanage garden held another quiet first: the city’s first botanical garden. So this site cared for children and, in a way, for knowledge at the same time.

Architecturally, the place still speaks that language of discipline and symmetry. The main façade uses an eclectic style rooted in classicism, which means it borrows from older formal architecture but mixes details more freely. You can see it in the broad projecting sections around the entrance, and in those groups of three windows joined under one shared arch frame, called an archivolt. The long wings stretch outward with single arched windows, shallow pilasters, and rectangular attic-like tops that give the building a steady rhythm.

In eighteen seventy-five, builders added two matching one-story corner houses to the block, placed symmetrically at opposite corners. Then, in eighteen eighty-three, the orphanage buildings passed to the gubernial zemstva, the provincial council of the Russian Empire, a body that handled local administration. From that moment, the complex took on another identity. One room stored archives, another held insurance offices, and by eighteen eighty-nine these buildings also hosted agricultural and industrial exhibitions. Some of those objects stayed and became part of the permanent museum collection.

That layered identity matters. In nineteen eighteen, when Bessarabia entered Greater Romania, the zemstva stopped functioning, and the complex became fully museum space until nineteen thirty-two. After that, the agronomy faculty of the University of Iași moved in for several years. The last building added here came in the interwar period, in a Neo-Romanian style, with paired arched windows and a zigzag frieze under the eaves.

Even in the twenty-first century, this place refused to become silent. In two thousand ten, it entered the administration of the National Museum of Ethnography, and the sign “Zemstva Museum” appeared at the entrance. A year later, new exhibitions opened. Independent artists, cultural groups, workshops, theater, concerts, and film screenings filled the site and its back garden. Then came new restoration plans, a proposed handover to the Romanian Cultural Institute, and later, in two thousand twenty, the removal of the cultural groups using the space. So the story here is still unsettled: care, administration, study, art, and argument, all sharing the same address.

This is one of the rare places in central Chișinău where an entire historic block still survives as a whole.

Take one more look at its measured symmetry... and when you’re ready, we can continue to the next stop.

On your right stands a pale stone, two-story building with a symmetrical classical facade, three projecting sections, and four columns framing the entrance.

This is the former Headquarters of the Country Council, known in Romanian as Sfatul Țării, and its calm exterior hides one of the most decisive rooms in Moldovan history. Architect Vladimir Țîganco drew the plans in nineteen oh two in a French-influenced classical style, with balanced lines and restrained ornament. He first imagined it as an orphanage and boarding house for seventy boys from noble families. By nineteen oh five, the tsarist Ministry of Education took it over and opened Boys' Gymnasium Number Three here instead.

Then history kept changing the building's job. During the First World War, soldiers filled it as a military hospital. In nineteen seventeen, it became the seat of Bessarabia's parliament. Inside these walls, on the second of December, nineteen seventeen, delegates proclaimed the Moldavian Democratic Republic. Then, on the twenty-seventh of March, nineteen eighteen, they voted for the union of Bessarabia with Romania.

If you want, glance at the before-and-after image in the app; the facade stays almost the same, but the forecourt later gains the Capitoline Wolf, turning the scene into a statement about Romanian identity.

Afterward, the building served a boys' school again, then agronomic studies, then survived heavy war damage before architect Etti-Rosa Spirer reshaped it in nineteen fifty. Today it belongs to the Academy of Arts, still carrying memory and argument in the same walls.

This building remains one of Chișinău's clearest symbols of identity claimed in public. When you're ready, we can continue to the next stop.

On your left, notice the pale brick facade, the tall horseshoe arches, and the Moorish-style tower that gives this museum its unmistakable silhouette.

This museum began in October of eighteen eighty-nine, when Baron A. Stuart turned the exhibits from Bessarabia’s first agrarian exhibition into something lasting. That beginning shaped everything... this was never only a room for curiosities. It started with the living world of the region: farming, animals, craft, and the habits of everyday life. As power changed, its name changed too, from the Agriculture Museum to the zoology and agriculture museum, then the Regional Museum of Bessarabia, and later the republican museum of the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. Since nineteen ninety-one, it has carried its present name, and the building itself now holds national architectural status. Behind it, a historic garden survives as a protected landscape monument, almost like an outdoor chapter of the collection. It is usually open Tuesday through Sunday, with Monday closed. This place keeps Moldova’s memory in layers. Take a moment here... and when you’re ready, we can continue to the next stop.

Look for a straight promenade lined with red granite busts on both sides, with a bronze Pushkin rising at the far end on a granite column.

This is the Alley of the Classics, a sculptural gallery set inside Ștefan cel Mare Public Garden, and it tells a story about memory... and who gets remembered. In nineteen fifty-eight, Chișinău gave this avenue its name and placed twelve busts here. Later, after the Soviet Union collapsed, the city added writers and poets from Romania and Bessarabia whose work Soviet schools had pushed aside. Today, twenty-eight busts stand here, honoring literary classics alongside political figures important to Moldova’s public life.

At one end, the alley reaches toward Ștefan cel Mare Boulevard. At the other, it meets that bronze bust of Aleksandr Pushkin, lifted on granite in a design by Aleksandr Opekushin from eighteen eighty-five. If you want, take a quick look at the before-and-after image; the ceremonial axis feels noticeably more polished in the newer view. On your screen, image three captures that long, deliberate line beautifully.

This alley turns walking into remembrance. It is open twenty-four hours a day, so you can linger as long as you like. Take it in... and when you're ready, we can continue to the next stop.

On your left, look for a tall bronze ruler standing on a pale stone pedestal, marked by Stephen’s raised cross and strong vertical silhouette.

This monument honors Ștefan cel Mare, Stephen the Great, who ruled Moldavia from fourteen fifty-seven to fifteen oh-four. Sculptor Alexandru Plămădeală shaped it between nineteen twenty-five and nineteen twenty-eight, but the metal itself carries an older memory: in nineteen twenty-seven, a Bucharest foundry cast the statue from bronze taken from six large Ottoman cannons captured in the war of independence of eighteen seventy-seven to eighteen seventy-eight. Even the material tells a story of victory reclaimed.

It first appeared here on the twenty-ninth of April, nineteen twenty-eight, on the tenth anniversary of Bessarabia’s union with Romania. The pedestal came from Cosăuți stone, cut into five giant monoliths, and Eugen Bernardazzi, son of Chișinău’s great city architect, designed it with engineer G. A. Levițchi. If you glance at the image in the app, you can see how firmly the restored statue commands its setting.

Then history turned rough. In nineteen forty, officials carried the statue to Vaslui after the Soviet ultimatum, and they demolished the pedestal left behind. It returned, left again, and ended up in a park in Craiova, where Plămădeală’s student Claudia Cobizeva recognized it in nineteen forty-five and helped bring it back. In nineteen sixty-seven and again in nineteen seventy-two, authorities tried to push this “inconvenient” monument aside, but protests saved it. Another photo on your screen shows the dignified stone base restored in nineteen ninety, with the original inscription returned.

That is why this statue feels less like decoration and more like a survivor.

You can come back to it at any hour, and when you’re ready, we’ll continue on to the Theological Seminary of Chișinău.

On your left, look for a pale masonry building with a long rectangular front, tall evenly spaced windows, and a formal central entrance that gives it the gravity of an old school.

This former Theological Seminary carries the weight of a very old idea: that a city shapes its future by deciding how it will educate its clergy, teachers, and thinkers. A seminary, in the simplest sense, trained future priests. But across Europe, places like this often did more than that. They taught language, philosophy, discipline, and public duty. In time, many of those religious schools became the seedbed of modern universities.

A revealing parallel comes from another seminary in Europe. There, in seventeen oh one, the theologian and pastor Jean-Frederic Ostervald began training future pastors. That teaching did not break for more than a century. In eighteen thirty-three, the pastors' company turned that living tradition into a formal Faculty of Theology. A year later, an older academic world began to gather around it. Back in seventeen thirty-two, the city had already created a chair of philosophy for Louis Bourguet, a scholar connected to the great European minds Leibniz and Reaumur, and soon after added a chair in belles-lettres, meaning literature and refined letters.

So the pattern is clear... theology first, then philosophy, then the wider life of the mind.

In eighteen thirty-seven, the government of Neuchâtel asked the King of Prussia, Frederick William the Third, to fund an academy. The money came in eighteen thirty-eight. The first official academic year opened in eighteen forty, the inauguration followed in eighteen forty-one, and by eighteen forty-three the academy awarded its first degree, a license in letters. Then history intervened. In eighteen forty-eight, politics, finances, and educational reform closed the academy altogether.

That could have ended the story. Instead, it sharpened it.

In eighteen sixty-six, a second academy opened with faculties of letters, science, and law. Theology rejoined in eighteen seventy-three. In nineteen oh nine, the academy became a university with the right to award doctorates. That change mattered. It marked the moment when older institutions of moral and religious training fully entered the modern research world.

If you glance at your screen, one image shows the humanities side of Neuchâtel, a reminder that language, history, and philosophy still grew from those earlier roots. Another shows the university entrance itself, much more modern in feeling, but born from the same long chain of decisions about what knowledge a society should protect.

The arc continued. In nineteen forty-three, Sophie Piccard became the first woman in French-speaking Switzerland to hold a full professorship at a university. In two thousand eight, Martine Rahier became the first woman to lead a university in that same region. By two thousand twenty-four, Neuchâtel counted four main faculties: law, letters and human sciences, science, and economics. It ran about eight hundred research projects at once, linked students to more than two hundred partner agreements abroad, and ranked among the world’s best small universities.

And yet one detail feels especially fitting here: in two thousand fifteen, Neuchâtel closed its Faculty of Theology.

That is the quiet lesson of this seminary. Institutions change their shape, sometimes completely. A seminary trains clergy. An academy trains scholars. A university trains a whole society. But each stage grows from the one before it. Standing here, outside this old house of formation, you are looking at the beginning of that long transformation.