Wine and Empire

Moldova, Transnistria, and the passage of time in a bottle

Dniester in Moldova, 2004.jpg” by Serhio is marked with CC BY-SA 3.0. To view the terms, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/?ref=openverse

Somewhere between the end of the USSR and the beginning of the present war, around about 1994, I think, I found myself in the former Soviet Republic of Moldova. Wedged between Ukraine to the East and Romania to the west Moldova is a stranded feeling sort of place in a region where whole peoples have tended to get stuck. The “Roman” in…