Moldovan culture: two Christmases and one shared heritage

Why Moldova keeps two Christmases on its calendar

Article 111 of the Moldovan labour code, adopted on 28 March 2003, lists the days on which nobody has to work. Two entries carry the same name, the Nativity of Jesus Christ, and the code tells them apart by calendar: 7 and 8 January are Christmas in the old style, 25 December is Christmas in the new. The second was added later. According to the Wikipedia summary of Moldovan public holidays, 25 December became a legal holiday in 2009, and the holiday season now officially opens with it. The winter holidays once ran from New Year's Day to the Old New Year in mid-January.

The same article gives 9 May two lines. Item g names it Victory Day and the day of remembrance of the heroes who fell for the independence of the homeland; item g1, inserted beneath it, names the same date Europe Day. Both stand in the same article with the same force, and a worker in Chișinău has the day off for both reasons at once.

Two more entries have no counterpart in most European codes. The Monday a week after Easter is Paștele Blajinilor, the Easter of the Blajini, a second Easter holiday that follows the first by eight days. And item j makes the hram, the feast day of the patron saint of the local church, a non-working day in that locality only, on a date the local council declares. Every parish in Moldova therefore has one public holiday that belongs to it alone.

The 31 August holiday shows how the calendar carries argument as well as custom. It was Limba noastră, Our Language, until Law No. 52 of 16 March 2023, which took effect on 15 April 2023 and renamed it Romanian Language Day. The history of that argument sits in Moldova's history; what matters for the calendar is that the older name is also the title of the national anthem, so the anthem and the holiday now name the language in two different ways.

Which church a Moldovan parish answers to

About 90% of the people counted in the 2014 census gave their religion as Eastern Orthodox. That figure hides a division. Orthodox parishes answer to one of two metropolises. The Metropolis of Chișinău and All Moldova, known as the Moldovan Orthodox Church, is subordinate to the Russian Orthodox Church. The Metropolis of Bessarabia is subordinate to the Romanian Orthodox Church. Wikipedia's summary of the religious data puts 80 to 90% of Orthodox Moldovans in the first and 10 to 20% in the second.

The constitution of 1994 keeps out of the choice. Article 31 guarantees freedom of conscience and lets religious cults organise under their own statutes. It makes them independent of the state and forbids "any manifestation of discord" in the relations between them. The state supports them in practice, by facilitating religious assistance in the army, hospitals, prisons, nursing homes and orphanages.

Britannica describes Soviet religious policy in Moldova as separation of church and state, exclusion of the churches from education and atheist propaganda aimed at the faithful, and it records that since the collapse of the Soviet Union all the churches have undergone a revival and tried to regain their former prominence. The buildings are older than any of that. Stephen the Great, who ruled the Principality of Moldavia in the 15th century, founded numerous churches and monasteries, and the cave monastery at Old Orhei was carved into a cliff face in the 13th century and is still in use.

The Orthodox majority is not the whole of it. Britannica notes that Jews began to arrive in substantial numbers after 1800 and that the community, overwhelmingly urban, was reduced by wars, pogroms, the Holocaust and emigration. For 2025, the Association of Religion Data Archives estimate reported by Wikipedia puts non-Orthodox Christians at 5.76% of the population and Muslims at 0.46%.

How Moldovans name their mother tongue in the census

The census asks for a mother tongue and lets people choose the label, and the labels do not agree with each other. In the 2024 census, 49.2% of respondents named Moldovan and 31.3% named Romanian, for what Law No. 52 of 2023 treats as one language called Romanian. Russian came next at 11.1%, followed by Gagauz at 3.8%, Ukrainian at 2.9% and Bulgarian at 1.2%.

The ethnic answers in the same census run differently. Almost 77% called themselves Moldovan and 8% Romanian, with Ukrainians at 5%, Gagauz at 4% and Russians at 3%. The gap between the ethnic and linguistic columns is widest for Russian: more people give it as their mother tongue than call themselves Russian. Russian also works as a second language: about 15% of the population spoke it in 2014, and Britannica records that people drawn into the cities, ethnic Moldovans especially, often took it on, and bilingualism became the norm.

The smaller communities keep their own. The Gagauz, a mainly rural people, have lived on the Bugeac Plain since the late 18th century, and ethnic Bulgarians settled the southern districts at about the same time. Gagauz is a Turkic language that was written in Cyrillic, and since 1989 the Gagauz have developed a Latin script for it. Article 13 of the constitution obliges the state to protect the use of "the Russian language and other languages spoken within the territory of the State".

Publishing followed the same proportions early on. Of the 520 books published in Moldova in 1991, 402 were in Romanian, 108 in Russian, eight in Gagauz and two in Bulgarian. Of the twelve professional theatres in the early 1990s, two played only in Russian, the A.P. Chekhov Russian Drama Theatre in Chișinău and the Russian Drama and Comedy Theatre in Tiraspol, and the Licurici puppet theatre played in both languages. Radio shows the same split: most private FM networks rebroadcast programmes from Russian and Romanian stations.

What Moldova has inscribed jointly with Romania

Moldova ratified the UNESCO convention on intangible heritage on 24 March 2006 and by 2025 had five elements on the Representative List. Four of them were nominated together with Romania, and one of those four with Bulgaria and North Macedonia as well. Most of what Moldova has asked UNESCO to record, it has asked for jointly.

The 1 March element is the one most people in Moldova handle every year. UNESCO describes the practice as making, offering and wearing a red and white thread at the start of spring and untying it when the first blossoming tree, swallow or stork is seen. In Moldova the thread is the mărțișor, and the inscription records local purification actions there as part of the wider spring celebration. In villages older women teach girls to make the thread; in towns, ethnographic museums run workshops.

The cobza, inscribed in 2025, is a pear-shaped string instrument with a short neck and a wooden body, strummed with a folded goose feather and used to provide rhythm and harmony in folk music, solo or in groups, mostly in rural communities. UNESCO notes that its players and makers come from several ethnic groups and that young musicians now study it in arts schools and universities; making one takes years of hands-on work and research into old instruments kept in homes and museums.

The fixed heritage is a shorter list. Moldova has one property on the World Heritage List, the Struve Geodetic Arc, inscribed in 2005. The Tentative List holds four more: the chernozem of the Bălți Steppe since 2011, the Orheiul Vechi archaeological landscape since 2017, the underground wineries of Cricova and Mileștii Mici since 2025, and the Cucuteni-Trypillia civilisation since 2026.

How Soviet rule restaged Moldovan folk art

Folk culture was the part of Moldovan life the Soviet state chose to display. The Wikipedia account of the period describes music and dance as particularly encouraged and made into a showcase, while their links to Romanian culture were played down. The national costume is its example: the opinca, the traditional Romanian moccasin, was replaced in the staged version by the Russian boot.

The same account divides the republic in two after the 1960s. Soviet authorities built urban cultural and scientific institutions and filled them with Russians and people from across the Soviet Union, so that much of the urban culture came from Moscow, and the mostly rural ethnic Romanian population was allowed to express itself in folklore and folk art. Many ethnic Romanian intellectuals had fled, been killed or been deported during and after the Second World War.

What survived from the villages is still performed. The ballads Miorița and Meșterul Manole sit at the centre of the oral tradition. Ceramics and weaving continue in rural areas, and the Doina folk choir is among the groups that carry the repertoire at national level. Britannica records a calendar of planting and harvest fairs with dancing, singing and folk arts, centred on villages near Chișinău and on the Orheiul Vechi monastery.

Cinema came out of the same period. A Moldovan film industry grew up in the 1960s, and its best known film is Lăutarii of 1972, written and directed by Emil Loteanu. Wedding in Bessarabia followed in 2009 as a co-production of Romania, Moldova and Luxembourg. In July 2022 the United Nations Development Programme announced that it would transfer more than 1,600 films from the Moldova-Film archive to new equipment for preservation.

Which writers Moldova and Romania both claim

Book printing in the Principality of Moldavia began in the mid-17th century with religious texts; the metropolitan Varlaam published the first books, and Dosoftei, also a metropolitan, founded numerous schools and was a prolific publisher. The chroniclers Grigore Ureche, Miron Costin and Ion Neculce belong to the same generation of scholars. Dimitrie Cantemir wrote the first thorough geographical, ethnographic and economic description of the country, Descriptio Moldaviae, published in Berlin around 1714.

In the 19th century the principality was split between Bessarabia, Bukovina and the western part that joined Romania in 1859, and writers from all three contributed to what became modern Romanian culture. Bessarabians among them included Alexandru Donici, Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu, Constantin Stamati, Costache Negruzzi, Alecu Russo and Constantin Stere. The poet Mihai Eminescu and the prose writer Ion Creangă are counted as national writers in Romania and in Moldova at the same time.

The Soviet and post-Soviet generation is named separately: Ion Druță, Grigore Vieru, Nicolae Dabija, Vladimir Beșleagă and Victor Teleucă.

How Moldovan music reached Eurovision

The concert tradition runs through the composers Gavriil Musicescu, Ștefan Neaga and Eugen Doga, whose name Chișinău's international airport now carries, and the soprano Maria Bieșu, who won the international competition in Japan.

Popular music reached a wider audience in 2003, when the band O-Zone released "Dragostea Din Tei". Moldova has taken part in the Eurovision Song Contest since 2005, and the band Zdob și Zdub represented it in 2005, 2011 and 2021. SunStroke Project's entry of 2010 became an internet meme through its saxophonist, and the band returned with "Hey Mama" in 2017. Carla's Dreams, who came to prominence in 2015, perform with painted faces and hoods, and the members' identities have not been disclosed; their song "Sub Pielea Mea" of 2016 charted in Moldova and in Russia at once.

What Moldovan kitchens make from the black earth

Moldovan cooking starts with the chernozem described in Moldova's geography: grain, grapes, fruit, vegetables, meat and milk. The staple is mămăligă, a porridge of yellow maize flour often served with sheep's cheese and sour cream. Plăcinte are deep-fried pastries stuffed with soft urdă cheese, cabbage, potatoes, apples or sour cherries. Sarmale are cabbage leaves rolled around rice, peppers, carrots and meat. Zeamă is a thin chicken soup with homemade egg noodles.

Russian, Turkish and Ukrainian cooking have all left dishes on the same table. Borscht is common, chiroște are dumplings of the pierogi family stuffed with soft cheese, and the honey cake medovik, of Russian origin, is known as tort smetanik. Brynza, a crumbly sheep or goat cheese, goes into salads, pies and dumplings. Recorded adult alcohol consumption was 15.2 litres of pure alcohol per person in 2016, split roughly evenly between spirits, beer and wine, and the spirit most associated with the country is divin, the Moldovan brandy. RECIPESpec is the sibling catalogue for the recipes themselves.

Why Moldovan wine is kept underground

The two best known wineries in Moldova are old limestone mines. Northern and central Moldova sit on compact limestone laid down by the Sarmatian Sea more than 30 million years ago, quarried for building stone since the medieval period and on an industrial scale in the 20th century. In 1951 the Council of Ministers of the Moldavian SSR resolved to hand the worked-out galleries to the state wine industry. In 1952 the galleries at Cricova became a sparkling wine factory with a capacity of four million bottles a year, and barrels of Fetească, Aligoté and Riesling went underground. That year is Cricova's official founding date.

The Cricova galleries run for more than 120 kilometres. In both wineries the galleries lie more than 50 metres down and are laid out as streets named after wines: Cabernet, Fetească, Pinot, Sauvignon, Codru. The winery's collection, begun in 1954, holds a bottle from 1902, and the Moldovan submission to UNESCO in January 2025 put the National Wine Cellar at about 1.3 million bottles. Mileștii Mici opened a storage department in its own former quarry in 1969. Guinness World Records recognised its Golden Collection in 2005, at 1.5 million bottles in the submission's figure; Wikipedia gives two million or more, and puts the galleries at 200 kilometres, of which 55 are in use.

Parliament declared the Cricova complex National Cultural Heritage in 2003 and extended the status to Mileștii Mici in 2005, and on 3 January 2025 the two were submitted together for the Tentative List under criteria iii, iv and v. The submission presents them as industrial heritage adapted to winemaking. Every October a National Wine Day opens the wineries to the public.