Southern Bessarabia had fascinated me long before I ever went there. A sliver of land south-west of Odessa, sandwiched between Moldova to the north, Romania to the west, and the Black Sea to the south. Located on the Danube delta, its marshlands are among the richest wildlife havens in Europe. But Bessarabia is also notable for the diversity of its population, formed by migrations and the vicissitudes of international politics and warfare over the preceding two centuries. This piece of territory in southern Ukraine is only part of historic Bessarabia, the majority of which today forms the Republic of Moldova to the north. Southern Bessarabia is also known as Budjak, a name that derives from the Turkish word for borderland. Its character was forged in the repeated shifting of borders between the medieval principality of Moldavia, the Ottoman and Russian empires, Romania, the Soviet Union and independent Ukraine.
Southern Bessarabia is linked with the rest of Ukraine by just two roads at either end of the delta, or ‘liman’ in Ukrainian and Russian, of the Dniester river. The route to the north passes briefly through Moldovan territory. As you leave Ukraine, if you are transiting through to southern Bessarabia and not planning to enter Moldova, you are handed a chit by a border guard, which notes the time and the number of people in the vehicle. You are then supposed to drive straight through, without stopping. When you re-enter Ukraine, the border guard checks the time on the chit to verify this. The southern route goes along the seashore, crossing a bridge over the entrance of the liman at the seaside resort of Zatoka. Neither route has a high capacity, and at Zatoka the bridge over the liman opens every so often to let ships pass, closing it to traffic for half-an-hour at a time. During the summer season, Zatoka is choked with tourists, slowing traffic on this southern route to a crawl. As a result, Southern Bessarabia feels isolated from the rest of Ukraine. The main road through the region had been notoriously bad until former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, during his controversial stint as Odessa regional governor in 2015-16, pressed for repairs. There was also talk of a new bridge across the liman, to link Odessa with Romania to the west by a new highway.
On my first visit to Bessarabia in November 2015, I went to Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi, on the western side of the liman. The town is notable for its massive fortress. There had been a fort here for centuries, a strategic hilltop position overlooking the liman. Much of what can be seen today dates from the Ottoman period, which finally ended in 1812, although Russian forces had captured the town more than once in the preceding decades. A striking memento of the Ottoman period is a minaret in the castle grounds, which once formed part of the Bayezid Veli mosque. A stone tablet nearby recalls that an Orthodox church had stood on the site before the Ottoman conquest. Today, Bilhorod-Dnistroskyi has a Ukrainian majority, but historically it was more diverse. Before the Second World War, when southern Bessarabia was part of Romania, the town contained significant Jewish and German populations, as well as Romanians (or Moldovans), Ukrainians, Russians, Bulgarians and Greeks. There is also an old Armenian church.
Bessarabia’s Jews were mostly victims of the Nazi holocaust. The Germans were deported by Stalin to Central Asia. But southern Bessarabia nevertheless retains its diversity, a fascinating patchwork of nationalities. None forms an overall majority. In some districts, such as Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi and Tatarbunary, Ukrainians predominate. Elsewhere, notably Bolhrad, it is Bulgarians. In Reni, in the far south-west, it is Moldovans. Gagauz, Orthodox Christians who speak a Turkish dialect, are also a significant presence in several areas, especially in the south-western districts of Bolhrad and Reni. Russians are found in significant numbers in several districts, including Izmail, southern Bessarabia’s most important town. There are also smaller groups. Roma are present in many areas, and often face the same kind of disadvantages and discrimination that they experience in so much of central and eastern Europe. Perhaps most surprising of all is the small Albanian community in the village of Karakurt, close to Bolhrad.
Unusually in southern Ukraine, Izmail retains its Ottoman-era name. One of the Ottoman Empire’s most important fortresses was on this site. The fort was first built in the 12th century by the Genoese, who dominated much of the trade in the Black Sea region during the golden era of the Silk Road. In the 15th century, the region was conquered by the Ottomans. The fortress at Izmail was strategically one of the most important in the Empire. Having been briefly captured by the Russians in 1770, it was heavily refortified by the Ottomans, and was supposed to be impregnable. When the great Russian general, Alexander Suvorov, attacked it again in 1790, the Sultan ordered the Ottoman defenders to stand their ground and on no account surrender. Suvorov’s successful storming of the fort in December that year is commemorated at the diorama, a three-dimensional model of the assault on the fortress. It was a terribly bloody affair, and most of the Ottoman defenders were slaughtered. Suvorov later reported that he wept following the victory.
The diorama is located in the only surviving building from the Ottoman period, a small mosque that had stood next to the fortress wall, on the bank of the Danube. The fortress itself was later razed to the ground, and all that can be seen of its once massive fortifications are the remains of ditches that once stood before the ramparts. A statue of Suvorov on horseback stands in the town centre, and one of the town’s many well-preserved 19th-century houses contains a museum with exhibits about Suvorov, and about the great battle for the fortress.
The symbolism of statues is particularly significant in Izmail, as elsewhere in Ukraine. When I first visited the town in November 2015, a huge statue of Lenin dominated the square in front of the administration building. However, here as all over Ukraine in the coming months, in compliance with a new law requiring the removal of all symbols of Communism and Nazism, the statue was taken down. The law caused division and anguish in many places in Odessa Region, as many people mourned the removal of ‘dedushka’, ‘grandfather’ Lenin. But removing Lenin from Izmail proved tricky. The base of the statue was so solid, that when I visited in April 2016 heavy machinery had been brought in methodically to smash it. By that August, the statue had been replaced by a flowerbed, and another smaller Lenin statue had also disappeared without trace. A city government official explained that they decided it was better to erase Lenin altogether than to put up another statue in the place where he had stood.
Izmail is an attractive town, its old buildings in good condition, its flowerbeds well-maintained. In this it is a marked contrast to the shabbiness of Odessa. The mayor, a former KGB man, won with more than 90 per cent of the vote in local elections in 2015. Such an outlandish margin invites scepticism, yet even the mayor’s critics among journalist and NGO workers in Izmail acknowledged, when I asked them, that he did a good job, and was genuinely popular. He typifies Ukrainian politics, a chameleon who changes his party affiliation with each change of the political wind direction, and maintains his grip on power. But as an effective advocate for the town, and a successful administrator, his support remains strong. No doubt Izmail’s success is also down to the presence of money. The port is an important employer, and many locals work as sailors, a well-paid profession.
The port in the nearby town of Reni, further up the estuary, is in a less healthy state. When I visited in April 2016, the port was quiet, buildings mainly empty, equipment idle. A manager from the port told us that in Soviet times a larger part of the port’s activity was connected with Yugoslavia. For example, Soviet cars were transported along the Danube to Belgrade. But all that had come to an end. The small amount of activity at the port today is mainly grain from Moldova. The port at Reni is a beautiful spot, especially at sunset, walking along the east bank of the Danube, while the sky blazes red on the opposite, Romanian side of the river. We once had a barbecue on the river bank, grilled trout washed down with red wine from the Shabo winery, close to Zatoka, while the sun gently sank beneath the horizon.
I enjoyed Bulgarian hospitality on several occasions in Bessarabia. The region is renowned for its fine sheep’s cheese, ‘bryndza’, and for lamb, which does not generally feature prominently elsewhere in Ukrainian cooking. On a visit in November 2015 to the town of Artsyz, where Bulgarians are the most numerous ethnic group, two prominent local Bulgarians entertained us to lunch and local wine, toasting us with the words “peace to the world, and money to the Bulgarians.” It was in a way a fitting motto for Bessarabia. While war raged elsewhere in Ukraine, here the various different nationalities continued to live peacefully alongside each other, getting along with their lives. There had been attempts to stir up trouble in 2014, when nearby Odessa teetered on the brink of open conflict, its streets a battleground between pro-Russian forces and Ukrainian nationalists. Leaflets appeared; a Russian flag was painted on the road outside Bolhrad; there was online propaganda. Amid the fear that conflict engenders, scared people in multi-ethnic lands can all too easily be persuaded to draw in on themselves, to band together to confront the feared other. But it didn’t work in Bessarabia. True, most members of minority ethnic communities there did not identify with the Ukrainian nationalism that exploded into revolution in Kyiv. The sympathies of some were undoubtedly with Russia. Yet they continued to rub along together much as before.
Bessarabia’s Bulgarians appeared content to be left in peace. Politically, they dominate in the areas where they are concentrated. In Artsyz, I met a local Bulgarian priest. Full of energy and enthusiasm, his big project was the construction of a large basilica, its architectural style inspired by an ancient church in Bulgaria. I visited it in November 2015. It had been under construction for four years already. He had found investors, and the basilica was being built partly by volunteers. While we were there, a football team from the nearby ethnic-Bulgarian village of Zorya were working on the site. We later heard they were champions of an amateur Ukrainian league. A few months later, in July 2016, I met this indefatigable priest again. This time his attention was focused on building a new clock tower on the town square, where until recently a statue of Lenin had stood, to mark the upcoming 200th anniversary of the town. Behind such projects lay an irresistible optimism, that despite the country’s problems, in Artsyz they could make their lives better.
Bessarabia’s Bulgarians came to the region in the early 19th century, invited by Imperial Russia to fill the empty spaces left by the Muslim population that had departed following its capture from the Ottoman Empire. In many villages, people knew exactly where in Bulgaria their ancestors had come from, which at that time was still under Ottoman rule. A local official in Zorya told me the village had been established in 1830, and had originally been called Kamchik after a river in Bulgaria from where the original inhabitants had migrated. There had already been a village on the site, but it had been abandoned by its Muslim inhabitants. At the beginning, there had been 34 families, and almost all the village’s inhabitants are descended from them. There is a small Bulgarian ethnographic museum in Zorya. The director had originally come from Russia, and had married a local man.
While Zorya’s population is almost entirely Bulgarian, its churches reflect the diverse past of the region. In addition to the Orthodox Church, there are three protestant churches. These had only appeared since the end of the Soviet Union, the museum director told me, but she thought Protestantism may have had deeper roots. Nearby Sarata had been a German-inhabited town until the Second World War, and their influence may have spread to Zorya.
The region’s Bulgarians have close connections with Bulgaria. Many villagers have Bulgarian citizenship, the local official in Zorya told me, giving them the possibility of working in the EU. Many also go to university in Bulgaria. In the village of Kubei, close to Bolhrad, I was told they have a Bulgarian-language school on Sundays. Bulgaria supplies textbooks, as well as funds for traditional costumes and musical instruments.
Holding dual nationality appeared to be a matter of pragmatism for Bessarabia’s Bulgarians. But for the Moldovans it was more controversial. Bessarabia, including present-day Moldova, had been part of Romania in the 1920s and 30s. The Romanian and Moldovan languages are virtually identical, and some in Moldova openly express hopes for reunification. Some see Romania’s offer of passports to Moldovans as an irredentist ploy to take back the territory lost in World war II. Crossing the border into Ukraine from Moldova near the town of Mayaki, an advertisement gave a phone number people could ring to enquire about Romanian citizenship. A local official in an ethnic-Moldovan village near Reni insisted that Romania’s offer was illegal, and that despite the attractions of an EU passport, local Moldovans would not sacrifice their Moldovan identity. A representative of the Moldovan community in Odessa insisted to me that Moldova had its own separate historical identity, and was worried about the influence of Romania in Moldova and in Ukrainian Bessarabia, promoting the idea that all are Romanians. But a shopkeeper in the village close to Reni expressed ambivalence as to whether they were Moldovan or Romanian. More importantly, they were poor. Many would take Romanian citizenship in order to be able to work in the EU, she said. But it was expensive, and few could afford it.
Visiting several ethnic-Gagauz villages in February and September 2016, there was plenty of discontent in evidence, as well as worry about the future. But everyone I spoke to, whether officials or members of the public, said they had no interest in any supposed Gagauz autonomy in Bessarabia, or link-up with the Gagauz autonomous republic across the border in Moldova. Bessarabia is multi-ethnic, they said, with different national groups in neighbouring villages. Such notions about Gagauz autonomy were attempts by outsiders to stir things up. Much of the discontent was economic in origin. A group of farmers in one Gagauz village told me they feared the village was dying. In Soviet times, they had produced a variety of agricultural products. But now they felt isolated from potential markets, unable to compete. People were leaving the village, many of them going abroad, to Turkey and elsewhere. Houses in the village were being abandoned.
There is pro-Russian feeling in Bessarabia, for sure, and evidence of the influence of Russian propaganda. An official in one Gagauz village told me he blamed the EU for interfering in Ukraine, and the United States for funding those behind the Maidan revolution. He said force should have been used to stop them. Either the EU should accept Ukraine as an equal partner, or let them go with Russia, he said. He believed Ukraine had been destabilised by western interference, but that the EU would not accept Ukraine, as it falls short of western standards and is too corrupt. There had been agitation in some Gagauz villages in 2014 about young men being drafted to go to fight in eastern Ukraine. An official in one village told me the military commissioner there had wisely not pressurised people to join the army. But in some villages, he told me, where the military commissioners had been more forceful, there had been conflicts. In another village, a Gagauz official told me people from that village would not go to fight in the east. They had relatives on the other side, he said, so why would they shoot at them?
In one mixed Gagauz-Bulgarian village, a school teacher acknowledged that there was pro-Russian sentiment in the village. They could not forget that two centuries earlier, Russia had given their ancestors sanctuary. But most people kept such feelings to themselves now, he said. That probably summed up the widely held view among Bulgarians and Gagauz, especially the latter. They might harbour pro-Russian feelings, and they might be antagonistic to the Maidan revolution, but as they had no possibility of influencing events, it was wisest just to keep their heads down and carry on trying to live as best they could. Thus had it ever been in Bessarabia. Borders changed, states and empires came and went, but the people who lived there had no say in the matter.
Much the same could be said for the Russian population. I visited the picturesque little town of Vilkovo three times during 2016. The majority of Vilkovo’s population are Russian Old Believers, a breakaway sect from the Russian Orthodox Church following a 17th century schism. Built on marshland on the Danube estuary, and criss-crossed by canals, Vilkovo is somewhat exaggeratedly known as the Ukrainian Venice.
On a glorious late-summer weekend that September, I took a boat trip through the canals from Vilkovo to the outer edge of the Danube littoral. Among the willow trees and the reed beds, here and there are weekend homes with jetties, moored boats, gardens with fruit trees, and men fishing. The farthest point of the delta is known as ‘Zero Kilometre’, the mouth of the Danube. A map shows how, over the decades, the ‘0 Km’ shoreline that marks the end of the delta has gradually extended out into the Black Sea, as sediment carried down the great river gradually creates new land. As the waters open up at this furthest point, a profusion of birds take advantage of the rich fishing, including swans, herons and pelicans. Later I ate a tasty meal of freshwater fish at a riverside restaurant. My evening meal was accompanied by the croaking of frogs, a particular speciality in the area of Vilkovo and nearby Kiliya. I enjoyed eating them on several occasions, especially cooked in a garlic sauce.
Persecuted in the Russian heartlands, the Old Believers had settled in the outer-reaches of the empire, in places like Bessarabia. There are three churches in Vilkovo, one of them a regular Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate), and two others Old Believer. The director of the privately-owned museum in Vilkovo, not himself an Old Believer, told me the town had been established in 1746, while the region was still under Ottoman rule. It had been settled both by Russian Old Believers and by Ukrainian Cossacks from the Zaporizhian Sich, the semi-autonomous Cossack realm which many Ukrainians regard as an antecedent of the modern Ukrainian state. The Sich was dismantled on the orders of Catherine the Great in 1775. Ukrainian settlement of Bessarabia began under Ottoman rule, when the Sultan offered Cossacks from the Zaporizhian Sich refuge in his realm.
In June 2016, we visited one of the Old Believer churches in Vilkovo, and spoke with an elderly lady who was cleaning the church. The priest was not there, she said, and would soon be leaving to join his wife in Italy. They were looking for a new priest, but it was not easy. She clearly asserted that she was Russian, but said the Old Believer community had no problems with the Ukrainian inhabitants in the town. Old Believers who had been called up to go to fight in the east had refused to go she said. If everyone in Ukraine had done likewise, there would be no war, she added. A local official told us the Old Believers had preserved their religious beliefs more faithfully than other religious communities under communist rule. But struggling to replace their priests, how well they would survive the post-Soviet era is another question.
Another endangered minority in southern Bessarabia is the Albanian community. In February 2016, I visited the village of Karakurt, and met local officials and teachers from the village school. They told us the village had been founded in 1811 by migrants from a village close to Varna, on the Black Sea coast in present-day Bulgaria. They said there were around 1,300 Albanians in the village, about half of the population. As with the Bulgarians and Gagauz who came to Bessarabia at that time, they were Orthodox Christians who had accepted Russia’s invitation to settle the newly conquered lands.
The people I met were proud of their Albanian heritage, and determined to preserve it. But it was evidently challenging. Until Soviet times, they said, people did not marry out of the Albanian community. But now there were many mixed marriages, and in such marriages, the children did not generally grow up speaking their native language. The children playing on the school playground, I noted, were speaking Russian. Still, efforts were being stepped up to preserve their language. Following a visit by an Albanian-embassy official, one of the school teachers had spent a month in Tirana, learning how to teach modern, standard Albanian. Now they were planning to include Albanian language as a subject in the curriculum of the village school. However, they acknowledged that their dialect was quite different from the standard Albanian spoken in Albania. The teacher who had visited Tirana had been inspired by her trip, but she had found it hard to understand the language spoken there. She reckoned only half of the vocabulary in their village dialect was the same as in standard Albanian. Lacking words for modern appliances and technologies, they borrowed words from Russian or Bulgarian. But, they noted, standard Albanian also included many foreign borrowings.
I wondered what chance they had of preserving their Albanian heritage among such a small population, many of whom had only a limited grasp of the language, and felt more comfortable in Russian? Not only were there many mixed marriages, but many young people were leaving for nearby towns such as Izmail and Odessa. And if they studied standard Albanian at school, what then of their unique dialect, presumably a lost remnant of the rich profusion of Albanian dialects once spoken around the Balkans, in present-day Bulgaria and Greece as well as the heartland of the language in Albania and neighbouring regions?
The hardship and dislocation that had afflicted all of Ukraine following the breakup of the Soviet Union had hit Southern Bessarabia acutely. Collective farms that had employed thousands had been replaced by modern agricultural enterprises that needed few workers. People are leaving the land, and many villages are dying. What hope then for the intricate fabric of this diverse land, if its people leave?
On top of that are the pressures to conform to the mores of the Ukrainian nation amid a determined surge to homogenise and build a more avowedly Ukrainian state. Among the multiplicity of nations of Bessarabia, Russian has long been the lingua franca. But reforms being introduced since the Maidan revolution seek to promote, even impose, Ukrainian. This policy, perhaps understandable given Russia’s assault on Ukraine since 2014, has introduced new strains. Bulgarian and Gagauz officials and teachers told me in early 2017 that they had no objections in principle to the use of Ukrainian in official documents, or to the switch to Ukrainian as the language of instruction in the region’s schools. Ukrainian is, after all, the state language. But why the rush? There were not enough teachers able to teach in Ukrainian, they said. For them Russian was already their second language, and Ukrainian their third, or even fourth. Such rapid change was simply too demanding. They expressed fears that teachers might under proposed new laws be punished for speaking to children in Russian. One teacher noted that under Romanian rule in the 1920s and ’30s, people had been punished for speaking languages other than Romanian in public. Such heavy-handed attempts to impose linguistic conformity brought back unhappy memories in multi-national Bessarabia.
Southern Bessarabia’s longer-term economic prospects may be better than appear now. The marvels of the Danube delta, the profusion of wildlife, will surely bring tourists. Some already come. Danube cruises bring people down the river from Germany and Hungary. Beach resorts are popular with holidaymakers from Moldova. And the national parks of the Danube delta, around Tuzli and Vilkovo, already bring tourists. In 2016, I twice visited the picturesque ethnic-Moldovan village of Orlivka, near Reni. The energetic head of the village council had big plans for the development of tourism. He was cooperating with a town across the river, in Romania, to boost tourism. Supported by a leading member of the regional administration, a Gagauz, they were planning to establish a ferry crossing. He was pinning his hopes on ecological tourism. He planned to build bird-watching towers, and a hotel complex and sanatorium. Most exotically, he was introducing water buffalo, which, apart from being an attraction in themselves, would, by eating vegetation in the water, improve irrigation and make Orlivka’s streams and lakes cleaner. He also envisaged milk and cheese production.
Many of Bessarabia’s people stand to benefit from such enterprise. However, adaptation is proving difficult. The Tuzli Liman national park has seen violent clashed between the park authorities and local fishermen who claim their traditional rights are being trampled. The future is probably brighter than these disgruntled locals appreciate now, although it may be that not everyone will benefit equally. Southern Bessarabia’s isolation may soon come to an end. What that will do for the delicate ethnic balance of this rich and beautiful land remains to be seen.
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