Soroca

Soroca sits on the Dniester River at a point where Moldova narrows to almost nothing and Ukraine is visible on the opposite bank, close enough that you can make out the tree line without binoculars. The river here is wide and slow and on the morning I arrived it was the color of pewter, reflecting a sky that couldn’t decide between rain and sun. The circular fortress at the water’s edge came into view around a bend in the road — sixteenth century, built by Moldovan Prince Petru Rareș in a perfect circle of dressed stone, so geometrically precise it looks less like a medieval fortification than like something a very confident architect designed for a competition.

The fortress is the reason most guidebooks mention Soroca, and it is worth seeing for the same reason it is satisfying to see any very old thing that has survived intact: the effort of continuity. But the reason I stayed two nights was the hill above the town, where the Roma community of Soroca has been building palaces since the 1990s. “Palaces” is not my word and not hyperbole. The houses on Gypsy Hill — as the locals call it, without apparent irony — are baroque constructions of extraordinary ambition: columns, gilded domes, Greco-Roman pediments, turrets, stained glass, palm-tree-shaped drainage pipes, lions made of concrete. Some are finished. Some are mid-construction, steel rebar erupting from half-poured concrete beside a completed entrance gate of polished black marble. One had a helicopter landing pad on the roof.

I walked the hill for an afternoon without any agenda beyond looking. A man washing a Mercedes in a driveway looked up and nodded. A woman hanging laundry between two marble columns watched me pass with the mild curiosity of someone accustomed to the occasional bewildered tourist. Most of the palaces were quiet and shuttered — many of the families live and work abroad, sending money back to fund construction, and the houses are maintained as symbols and investments more than residences. This gives the hill a slightly melancholy grandiosity, like a film set where the production has been paused.

The old lower town by contrast is very quiet in a different way — a working Moldovan town with a central market, a good bakery, and an Orthodox church with a beautiful iconostasis that glows with candlelight even in the middle of the afternoon. The view from the church forecourt takes in the fortress, the river, and Ukraine just across the water, and there is something in the compression of that view — medieval fortress, international border, a country visible but unreachable — that crystallizes something about where exactly Moldova sits in the world.

I had dinner at the small hotel restaurant, which served a papanaș — a Romanian fried cheese doughnut with sour cream and cherry jam — so good that I ordered a second one before the first was finished. The waiter was not surprised. He said the papanaș were the reason most of their Romanian guests booked.

When to go: April through October is comfortable for the walk to Gypsy Hill. The fortress is more dramatic in the golden light of late afternoon. Soroca is about two hours north of Chișinău by marshrutka — the shared minibuses that form Moldova’s real transport network.