Transnistria - The Other Side of Moldova

When Moldova split during the fall of the Soviet Union, its eyes flicked west. Lurching through independence, linguistically & geographically, Romania was its closest neighbour & Russia represented the bad old days; authoritarian rule & queues for food.

But not everyone agreed.

A slither of industrial land & communities dissected by the Dniester River still felt the comfort of the Motherland & resisted the westward pull. A short & bloody war secured a breakaway; creating a country within a country. With its own borders & local currency, Transnistria has the tools of a nation, just without international recognition. Only those in the same boat have formal relations; Abkhazia, Kosovo, Palestine, all pseudo-nations screaming for identity.

Until recently, access for those of us in the decadent west was difficult; all impenetrable bureaucracy & bribes at the border. But in the last couple of years, a kind of tolerated tourism has developed. Now there’s an anti-corruption phone line at the border. If an old-school guard starts thumbing your passport, suggesting registration issues you get your mobile out.

Angry Lenin

With its Soviet iconography & tank-wide boulevards, the capital, Tiraspol, is a freeze-frame of the old Soviet Union. Lenin hasn’t been toppled from his plinths & the war memorial features both an onion-topped spire & a tank. It begs to be photographed in sepia.

I walked the main street, named after the 1917 Russian Revolution, from the towering statue of Lenin at one end to the angry bust of Lenin at the other. On the way, I passed Gagarin, Frunze & other Soviet icons. I chanced a croissant at a bakery, but found a frankfurter inside. Luckily, the tiramisu was sausage-free. It may thumb its nose at the decadent west, but Transnistria loves English football, with several channels dedicated to the Premier League. The reason for this is Sheriff; a private company that has stamped its brand across the republic; a huge hypermarket sits next to the FC Sheriff stadium & sponsored billboards are commonplace. Setup by ex-KGB & heavily involved in national politics, Sheriff is the corporate face of Transnistria.

In truth, Transmistria is no different to many other former Soviet republics in dealing with 70 years of Communist legacy. Some, The Baltics for instance, have smashed Lenin & Marx to pieces. The Central Asian Stans have quietly relocated them to less prominent positions (in case the wind changes), whereas Transnistria, like Belarus, seems to dismiss the whole fall of Soviet Russia as western propaganda.

I Love Tiraspol

On the day I returned home, the UK press carried an article about Moldovan politics. A new President with pro-Russian sympathies was promising to review the status of Transnistria, bring it back into the national fold perhaps? A reminder that politics, territory & nationhood are ever-changing. I took three things away with me back to the west; how eerily quiet it was at night, a bottle of local Kvint brandy (now in a million pieces thanks to my drunken butter-fingered sister) & a clever hotel toothbrush which could separate in two & slide into a protective case.

Odessa

I first travelled to Ukraine in 2008. The Orange Revolution had just rebooted national identity towards Europe & it felt like a new path had been forged. Eight years on, Maidan power had forced another Government overthrow, brutal & monochrome this time with snipers on the roof & thousands dead. I returned to a trimmer country, its Eastern border still blurred by violence & the exotic southern peninsula of Crimea cut & pasted onto Russia.


Odessa port

It took me two days & three flights to get to Odessa; the city of Battleship Potemkin, the wild-haired Eisenstein & a pram bouncing down the stairs. Odessa is a Slavic Trieste with the thrust & polyglot babble of a port city. Even the gypsies were multilingual, pleading “money mister,” flashing silver teeth & flirty smiles. Creamy 19^th century architecture stood among right-angled Soviet blocs & onion domes but the staircase was a crushing disappointment, under renovation; Cossack troops replaced by hard hats, guns with drills.


Potemkin Steps

Odessa was a city of small parks & bronze statues, surrounded by swaying wheat fields & flanked by the Black Sea. A strong Jewish heritage had been reduced to plaques & grim memorials. I stamped the streets & peered into courtyards, plaster peeling under taut lines of drying clothes, looking for vegetarian cafes & Turkish coffee. I stayed at the Londonskaya Hotel, a Victorian-era classic still living on the radiance of glamour from a century ago.

From Odessa I travelled by minibus, fuzzily hungover from Odessa Champanska, through fields of vines to Chisinau in Moldova. I sat at the back, a seat with a view, plugged into music & the stories of Isaac Babel. It was a beautiful journey across rural Bessarabia, sharply lit by winter sunshine & the trace of village wood smoke in the air.

Kyrgyzstan June 2016

Bishkek

My journey to Uzbekistan the previous spring was perhaps my best ever solo trip; I was captivated by the overlaying Soviet & Islamic worlds, the context of the Great Game & the sheer depth of Central Asian history. The research alone required a new bookshelf. The Uzbek cities formed the backbone of the Silk Road as the caravans of trade followed the paths of least resistance & left Kyrgyzstan isolated. Local Kyrgyz travel literature is scarce & the country is even difficult to pronounce, let alone spell. Kyrgyzstan is a Silk Road bypass; a country of yurts rather than caravanserai. Mountainous & mysterious. Yet, visas were free & flights were cheap. They just landed at ungodly hours.


Historically, Kyrgyzstan is still looking over its shoulder. This is the post-Soviet world which isn’t sure where to turn next. The traditionally nomadic Kyrgyz along with streams of forcibly displaced ethnic minorities created a new Central Asian society which after years of struggle & hunger bore fruit in the Brezhnev era as the Soviets turned the region’s isolation to their advantage. They built armament factories & secret submarine bases, all away from prying western eyes. Benefit for the locals? Full employment. In the capital, Bishkek, Lenin & Marx still stand tall on park-side plinths, pointing to the future, to a scrapped world.

MiG, Bishkek

My hotel was a concrete beauty with all the trappings of the Soviet era; smoked glass, a vast marble reception area & juddering lifts. High up on my balcony, I looked across to the Circus & the Palace of Sports. Still standing & still open.

Bishkek felt provincial, particularly around the suburban fringes, but in the centre it was pure Soviet. Tank-sized boulevards that took an age to cross, huge squares with piped music & dancing fountains & parked downtown among the marshrutkas & battered taxis; a MiG.


A squashed three hour shared-taxi ride from Bishkek took me to Lake Issyk Kul. The lake is the heart of Kyrgyzstan, an alpine bowl, a mile above sea level with sandy beaches ringed by mountains. I stayed in a quiet village at a newly built hotel. Only, Igor, the owner, spoke some scattered English & the sole thing I could transliterate from the Cyrillic menu was an omelette, which I ate three nights in a row. Every time I needed something (Wifi password, another omelette); the staff summoned Igor by radio.

Lake Issyk Kul

The lake has a mirco-climate & the weather changed quickly & dramatically. In the mornings, blue skies backdropped snow-tipped mountains & the lake glittered. Then dark clouds rolled over the mountains & marched to the lake’s edge, surrounding the water but unable to push further. You could swim in the lake & feel the warmth of the sun & then return to the beach to find your clothes rainsoaked & the air full of static.

Burana tower

I trekked to a petroglyph site up in the hills above Cholpon Ata. Rainclouds were closing in & I was unsure of the way, even after a kind local drew a map in the mud with a lolly stick. In the end I retraced my steps & took a taxi, only to find I had walked to within thirty metres of the entrance. Sigh. A pound wasted. The stones depict deer & goats, dating back to the 5th century BC. Despite their longevity, modern chemical restoration could erode images which have survived 2,500 years of battering Kyrgyz weather. The effect is akin to a photoshopped image, the colours saturated & the contrast sharpened. I trekked back to town along an old runway & joined holidaying Russians on the beach, eating Samarkand non bread the size of dinner plates, & apples from Kazakhstan.

In the post-Soviet world, every car is a taxi & I caught a lift with a family to the Silk Road city of Balsagun & the Burana Tower. The city is long-gone, just grassy mounds, grave markers & a single minaret which in a country with few Silk Road survivors creates a visual brand for Kyrgyz tourism. Samarkand this isn’t, but the tower’s setting in a summer meadow full of flowers, backlit by sun filtering onto green hills was an accurate microcosm of Kyrgyzstan.



Aral Sea

Flying home, I lucked an emergency row & window seat. From 40,000 feet the view was sharp & cloud-free.

Through Kazakhstan, over the smudged outline of the Aral Sea, where Soviet irrigation has shrivelled the coast & then across the Caspian before the view changed from blue sea to white caps as we followed the Northern Caucasus to the Black Sea.

In transit at Ataturk, I was four days ahead of a terrorist attack that killed 42 in the arrivals hall. Two weeks later there was an attempted military coup. A sobering return to reality.