Piața Centrală: The Main Market in Chișinău
I reached the market before I'd even passed through its gate. Piața Centrală starts a few streets early: on the benches around the grounds sit women who have built themselves counters out of cardboard boxes - little piles of hot peppers lined up on cardboard, parsley, roots and all, in a plastic bag, rounds of homemade brynza on crates, cups of orange marigold flowers. The gold lettering above the official entrance is just a formality after that.
Piața Centrală (Russian: Центральный рынок) is the main and largest market in Chișinău, open since 1825 - a place where you can walk through Moldovan cuisine in its raw form, from grapes to homemade sour cream.
Two Hundred Years by the Math, One Hundred and Seventy-Five by the Website
The market opened in 1825 as the New Bazaar - "new" because Chișinău already had an old one. For roughly the first eighty years, traders paid nothing for their pitches, so the market grew faster than many a neighborhood; at the end of the 19th century, a city order gave the wooden stalls a stone makeover. In July 1941, a demolition squad of the retreating Soviet army mined the market and blew it up, in keeping with scorched-earth tactics. After the war the market came back; it had already been known as the Central Market before the war, and after the collapse of the Soviet Union the name was simply translated from Russian into Romanian. Anniversaries are handled generously here: the official website greets visitors with "175 springs", the Chișinău library celebrated "205 years since its founding" in January 2025 - and yet simple subtraction gives exactly two hundred. For comparison, the largest market in Romania's Iași didn't open until 1970.
Five and a Half Hectares Between a Boulevard and a Bus Station
Today the grounds cover five and a half hectares in the very center of Chișinău, between Ștefan cel Mare Boulevard and the bus station. In 2020 the city counted more than seven hundred kiosks and four thousand pitches: covered pavilions for dairy, meat and fish - in the fish pavilion, live fish swim in tanks - and between them, outdoor rows of metal counters under tarps. It's the biggest and busiest market in the city; whether it's also the biggest in the country, nobody has ever reliably measured.
In autumn, there's also sweet corn at seven or eight lei (about 0.40 EUR) an ear with signs written in Russian, pyramids of small cucumbers labeled "Rodniciok de casă", smoked meat and bacon sold straight off the table, and cookies and candies weighed into bags from paper compartments. At one counter, the yellow of homemade borș acru glows among a row of plastic mineral water bottles; from late winter, Mr. Cojușna sells barrel-fermented watermelons, and in autumn, cups of freshly shelled walnuts turn up on the cardboard. And because a proper market doesn't just feed the kitchen, a few aisles further on you're rummaging through clothes, toys and kitchenware - like the pot-bellied Rashko Baba cauldrons, which look like grandpa's old cast iron but are actually Afghan pressure cookers made of aluminum a full centimeter thick, sold all over the former Soviet Union.
Grapes Named Moldova and Dates from Crimea
In early October, the counters belong to grapes. Moldova breeds its own table varieties: the dark Moldova, developed at a Chișinău viticulture institute, covers more than half of the country's table-grape vineyards and is exported to twenty-eight countries, Mongolia included. The white Alb de Suruceni, named after a village just outside the city, has been a local classic since the 1970s - at the market, a cardboard sign above grapes in three colors gave it in the feminine form, "Albă de Suruceni".
One crate over lies a surprise: red-and-green fruits the size of a plum and a handwritten sign reading "Zizifus", at 50 lei a kilo (2.40 EUR). The jujube, also called the Chinese date, came to Moldova in 1975 from a botanical garden in Crimea, and the local fruit-growing institute now grows forty-five varieties of it. Fresh, it tastes like a small, hard apple; dried, like a date; and in Moldova they pickle it and eat it instead of olives. In Iranian cuisine, the jujube has had a more glamorous career - its flesh is pressed there into cubes of habeh anab. Next to it stands a crate of black chokeberries, and right behind that, orange sea buckthorn.
A Soda Machine Run by a Lady
By one of the halls, a stainless-steel soda machine with four taps gleams on top of a red cabinet. On a little table in front of it, cups stand like a sample display: orange, green, dark and clear. The price list is a four-word poem: minerala, limonad, frigușor, kvas - a small cup costs three to five lei (about 0.20 EUR). Frigușor literally means "little chill"; what exactly comes out of that tap I never found out, even afterwards, and maybe that's just as well.
The Soviet Union came up with soda vending machines in the 1930s, and they became part of everyday life in the late 1950s: a glass of plain soda for one kopeck, with syrup for three. Everyone drank from the same glass tumbler, which was only rinsed between customers by a jet of water on a little grate - and for that, folk humor gave the machines a nickname I'd rather leave in Russian: "сифилизатор". Today the coin has been replaced by a lady in a blue apron who pours, takes the money and hands out disposable cups. I came across much older machines at Osh Bazaar in Bishkek; the Chișinău version is all polished up, but the principle hasn't changed - syrup, bubbles and a person keeping an eye on the whole thing.
Pateu at Every Entrance
By the entrances, the same stall keeps turning up with the sign "Pateuri Fierbinți!" - hot pirozhki, in other words. The word pateu is a linguistic trap, though: in Bucharest it gets you puff pastry, or even pâté, whereas in Moldova a pateu is a fried yeast-dough pirozhok on the Russian model - filled with potatoes, cabbage or quark, at twelve lei (0.60 EUR) apiece. In the display case next to them lie pricier plăcinte made from thin hand-stretched dough and half-moon chebureki; everything is fried fresh all day long and eaten out of hand, standing up between the stalls if you like.
The Dairy Hall: Cheese Rounds in Cloth and Scales from Two Generations
The dairy hall made the strongest impression on me. Behind the counters stand women in headscarves and aprons, and in front of them lie rounds of fresh caș cheese wrapped in cloth, blocks of butter with handwritten "unt de casă" signs, and enamel pots of thick smântână, ladled straight into a bag sitting on the scale. Next to the digital scales, old blue dial scales are serving out their last days; an icon hangs above one counter, and on another, a plucked rooster lies next to the quark, head and comb still on. The local brânză - fresh caș rubbed with salt - belongs to the family of white salted cheeses that stretches from Romanian telemea to Bulgarian sirene - and the village women bring the cloth-wrapped rounds here themselves.
A Market That Spills into the Streets
And then there's a layer that no official kiosk count will ever capture. On the benches and sidewalks of the surrounding streets, the sellers are mostly pensioners and country folk: a box serves as the counter, a bench as both storeroom and shop window. Technically it's an offense, and the police regularly raid the area; in 2017 alone, they recorded more than five thousand cases across Chișinău. "They won't even let us sell a bit of brynza!" vendors complained to reporters from Radio Free Europe. But habit outlasts the law: the benches stay occupied, and the same scene plays out at markets from Ukraine to Kyrgyzstan.
The nicest scene of the morning came courtesy of the raspberries. A woman on a bench had laid a freshly cut sprig of raspberries, leaves and all, beside her little tubs - no sign could make a better ad. And when I raised my camera, she sat by her produce as straight and proud as if she were posing for her school yearbook photo.
A Morning at Piața Centrală
We spent a Saturday morning at the market; the signs around us kept jumping from Romanian to Russian and back. At the soda machine I just stood and watched, and in the dairy hall we tasted whatever the vendors offered us, even though in the end we didn't buy anything. Our only purchase was grapes: white and red, both Moldovan varieties - and they were superb. Where exactly the market ends is impossible to say anyway - the benches with brynza and raspberries carry on for a while past its fences. At Piața Centrală, the gate really is just a formality.
Piața Centrală
