Who ruled Chișinău?

Chișinău lies on low hills along the small Bâc river in the centre of the land between the Prut and Dniester rivers, the region known as Bessarabia. Unlike many European capitals it has no ancient walls or medieval core: it was a modest market village until the 19th century, when the Russian Empire made it the administrative centre of a new province. Since then it has changed hands between Russia, Romania and the Soviet Union, was nearly destroyed in the Second World War, and in 1991 became the capital of independent Moldova. Its Russian name, Kishinev, is still widely used.

The steppe and forest country around the city was crossed by many peoples in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, and in the 13th and 14th centuries it fell within the sphere of the Mongol Golden Horde. Chișinău first appears in a document of 1436, when the princes of Moldavia granted villages in the area to a local landowner. The name is often explained as coming from old Romanian words for a "new spring", and a stone near the old Măzărache Church marks the spring said to have given it its name.

The Principality of Moldavia became a tributary of the Ottoman Empire in the 16th century. The map shows the city as Ottoman from 1530 to 1878, but Moldavia kept its own princes and was never a regular Ottoman province, and Chișinău came under Russian rule in 1812, decades before the map suggests. The village was burned during the Russo-Turkish wars, in 1739 and again in 1788, and had only about 7,000 inhabitants at the start of the 19th century.

By the Treaty of Bucharest in 1812, Moldavia's lands east of the Prut were handed to the Russian Empire, which named the region Bessarabia and chose Chișinău as its capital. Planners laid out a grid of wide streets beside the old town, and the population grew quickly through settlement by Russians, Ukrainians, Bulgarians, Germans and, above all, Jews. The poet Alexander Pushkin spent his exile here from 1820 to 1823. By 1900 the city had about 125,000 people, and over 40 per cent of them were Jewish. In April 1903 a pogrom incited by an antisemitic newspaper killed around 49 Jews and wrecked hundreds of homes, causing outrage around the world and spurring Jewish emigration.

As the Russian Empire collapsed, a regional council in Chișinău proclaimed a Moldavian Democratic Republic in December 1917 and voted in 1918 to unite with Romania. In June 1940 the Soviet Union annexed Bessarabia under its pact with Nazi Germany, and a strong earthquake that November added to the damage. Romanian and German forces retook the city in July 1941. Most of its Jews were killed or deported in the Holocaust, and by the time the Red Army returned in August 1944 the city was largely in ruins.

Rebuilt as the capital of the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic within the Soviet Union, Kishinev grew into an industrial city of broad avenues and concrete housing estates, with many new residents from elsewhere in the Union. A national movement demanded official status for the Romanian language in the Latin alphabet, which was granted in 1989, and on 27 August 1991, during the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Moldova declared independence with Chișinău as its capital.

Since then the city has been the centre of a contest between pro-European and pro-Russian politics, while the separatist region of Transnistria, east of the Dniester, has remained outside the government's control since a war in 1992. Moldova became a candidate to join the European Union in 2022. The 2024 census counted about 720,000 people in the Chișinău municipality, more than a quarter of the country's population.