Tag: #Moldova
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The skirmish at Bender, Charles XII, and the word we still use today
After visiting Bender on my recent trip to Moldova and watching a video about the Great Northern War, I fell down a small historical rabbit hole. Charles XII of Sweden has one of the strangest stories of any European monarch and the moment that ended his Ottoman adventure happened right there, in a town I had…
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Who are the Bessarabian Bulgarians
Some Bulgarian families have lived in the same village for over two centuries but technically resided in eight different states without ever moving. The first Bulgarians settled in southern Bessarabia at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries, during a period of chaos in the Ottoman Empire and after the Russo-Turkish…
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We crossed into a place that might not exist much longer
The PMR (Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic, or Transnistria as some call it) is a small unrecognized breakaway state sandwiched between Moldova and Ukraine. No UN member recognizes it as an independent country, it is not in any international organization, and yet it has its own government, army, currency and passport. It has been on my radar…