Comrat

Nobody warned me that Gagauzia would feel this distinct. Moldova is already an unusual country and I had grown accustomed to its particular texture — the mixture of Romanian and Russian, the Orthodox churches, the vineyards, the Soviet apartment blocks alternating with nineteenth-century merchant houses. Then I crossed the internal administrative boundary into Gagauzia and everything shifted slightly, in the way that a translation shifts when you are not entirely sure which language you are now in. The signs in Comrat, the regional capital, are in three languages: Romanian, Russian, and Gagauz — a Turkic language, related to Turkish but written in Cyrillic, spoken by the roughly 150,000 Gagauz people who have lived in this corner of southern Moldova for centuries and who are, to a confounding degree, Christian.

The question of how a Turkic people came to be Orthodox Christians in the middle of Eastern Europe is not one with a clean answer, and the people of Comrat are comfortable with the absence of a clean answer. I asked the owner of the guesthouse where I stayed — a woman in her fifties who ran the place with the systematic efficiency of someone who had organized many things in many systems and found competence to be its own reward — and she said: “We were always Christian. The Turks are not all one thing.” She said this with the patience of someone who has delivered this clarification before.

Comrat has the feeling of a regional capital that is deeply aware of its own distinctiveness and has decided to wear it quietly. The Gagauz parliament building — the government of an autonomous territorial unit that is not a country, exactly, but is not merely a region either — sits on the central square and is modest in the way that the institutions of small peoples tend to be modest, because they have learned that modesty outlasts grandiosity. The local museum has a room devoted to Gagauz language and culture that is one of the more affecting small ethnographic displays I have encountered — not because it is grand, but because the effort of preserving a minority language and tradition always carries a weight that majority cultures don’t need to match.

The wine of Gagauzia is red and takes no interest in subtlety. I tasted it at a local producer whose cellar was three barrels deep and a conversation wide — he spoke no French and minimal Russian, and I spoke no Gagauz, so we communicated in the universal language of poured glasses and approving nods. The Merlot-dominant blend was dark and tannic and had the particular quality of wine made to accompany food rather than to be analyzed, and when I had it with a plate of köfte — the Gagauz lamb meatballs that are one of the more remarkable overlaps between the Turkish and Moldovan culinary traditions — the combination was exactly right.

The köfte I found at a small restaurant that had a handwritten sign in Gagauz in the window and a menu in Russian and Romanian. The woman who served it brought it with flatbread and a yogurt sauce that was unmistakably Ottoman in character, except that we were in southern Moldova and she had never been to Turkey and didn’t seem particularly curious about the connection. The food was simply what it was — what her grandmother had made, what the region makes, what you eat here when you eat well. That unself-consciousness is, I think, what Comrat offers that is hardest to find anywhere else: a culture that has not yet decided its own interestingness is a product.

When to go: September through October is the best time — harvest season and the grape festivals that the Gagauz take seriously. Summer is very hot but the region’s flatness and the reliable southerly light give the landscape a particular photographic quality. Comrat is about an hour and a half south of Chișinău by marshrutka.