Old Orhei

The Răut river, a tributary of the Dniester, loops through a narrow limestone gorge north-east of Chișinău, carving its bed into three tight meanders between cliffs that stand well over a hundred metres above the water. On the promontories inside these bends lies Old Orhei, the most important cultural site in Moldova: a landscape where bare rock, steppe grassland and village gardens are layered over the remains of several thousand years of settlement, and where monks once hollowed out cells and chapels in the cliff face above the river.

Excavations have found traces of people here from the Palaeolithic onwards, including the Chalcolithic Cucuteni–Trypillia culture and a Geto-Dacian earth-and-timber stronghold of the 6th to 1st centuries BC. In the 14th century the Golden Horde built a town on the site, known in its sources as Shehr al-Jedid, "the New City", with a stone fortress, bathhouses and other buildings whose foundations can still be traced. After the Horde was pushed out late in that century, the place became a town of the Principality of Moldavia, and under Stephen the Great the stone citadel was repaired, fitted with artillery and made the seat of the local governors. In the mid-16th century the inhabitants left and founded a new Orhei some 15 km to the north-west, and the old fortress was destroyed, probably on the orders of Prince Alexandru Lăpușneanu at Ottoman demand.

The cliffs hold about 350 caves and hollows, roughly a hundred of them cut by hand, gathered into six groups. Two of these are full monasteries with underground churches, galleries and cells, set mainly in the north face of the Butuceni promontory. A few Orthodox monks still keep a church on the hilltop above them, and the caves remain in use as chapels; Church Slavonic inscriptions from the 1690s record that outlaws, the haiduci, once hid in them from the Ottoman authorities. The site sits at the heart of Orhei National Park, created in 2013, and the Orheiul Vechi Archaeological Landscape has been on Moldova's tentative list for UNESCO World Heritage since 2017.

Getting there

Old Orhei lies by the villages of Trebujeni and Butuceni, about 15 km south-east of the town of Orhei and some 60 km north-east of Chișinău by road. The nearest airport is Chișinău International Airport (RMO), about 42 km away by straight line.