Orhei

Moldova went without a national park longer than almost anyone in Europe — until 12 July 2013, when Parliament founded Parcul Național Orhei across 33,792 hectares of the country's wooded waist, 46 kilometres north of Chișinău. The choice of ground was not a wilderness but an argument about what Moldova is: the Codri, the hill forests of the Central Moldavian Plateau, where sessile and pedunculate oak with hornbeam, lime and maple cover a relief of ridges and amphitheatre-headed ravines quite unlike the steppe flatness the country's name usually conjures. The park spreads over parts of four districts — Orhei, Strășeni, Călărași and Criuleni — and nearly a third of it is private land, with villages, orchards and vineyards inside the boundary. It is a working landscape under a park regime, closer in spirit to a French parc than to Yellowstone, with a strictly protected core of just under a thousand hectares in the deepest forest.

The park's eastern edge is its geological showpiece. The Răut, Moldova's longest internal river, cuts a gorge through rock that was once alive: the cliffs at Trebujeni and Butuceni are fossil reefs of the Sarmatian sea, built by corals and bryozoans some ten million years ago and left standing as hard grey walls a hundred metres above the river when the sea withdrew. The Răut loops through them in tight meanders, and every civilisation that passed this way fortified the loops — Getae ramparts from the sixth to third centuries BCE, the Golden Horde town of Șehr al-Cedid with its bathhouse foundations from the 1330s, and the medieval Moldavian town of Orhei that gave the modern city downstream its name. Monks cut churches and cells straight into the reef rock; the cave monastery in the cliff above Butuceni, entered through a bell tower on the plateau, is still in use. The whole ensemble is managed as the Orheiul Vechi cultural-natural reserve and has spent years on UNESCO's tentative list — nominated twice, withdrawn twice, inscribed never, which changes nothing about the place itself.

Away from the gorge the park is forest and monastery country. Curchi, in a wooded valley near Vatici, is one of Moldova's best-known monastic ensembles, its late-eighteenth-century brick church standing in an enclosure of orchards; Ivancea keeps a nineteenth-century boyar manor in an English-style park. The woods themselves carry the Codri fauna — roe deer, wild boar, badger, pine marten, and a strong woodland bird community from black woodpecker to honey buzzard — and in spring the forest floor runs through the full Central European sequence of snowdrops, corydalis and wild garlic before the canopy closes.

What's worth knowing before you go

Trebujeni and Butuceni are the practical base: the two villages inside the Răut bend have grown Moldova's best rural guesthouses, serving zeama and plăcinte in courtyards under the cliffs, and staying overnight is the way to have the gorge in evening light after the Chișinău day-trippers leave. Buses run daily from Chișinău's central bus station to Trebujeni; by car it is under an hour. The Orheiul Vechi visitor centre at the entrance to the complex sells tickets for the cave monastery and museum, and the classic walk is the loop from Butuceni along the ridge to the monastery and back along the river — a few unhurried hours. Curchi and Ivancea are short drives west and are easily strung into the same day.

Late April to early June and September to mid-October are the seasons — spring for the forest flowers and the green Răut valley, autumn for the golden Codri; high summer is hot, hazy and short of shade on the gorge rim. The connoisseur's addition is Brănești, the next village toward Orhei city, where a winery ages its bottles in galleries mined into the same Sarmatian limestone the monks carved — reef rock at cellar temperature, tasted rather than climbed.