The Far Outliers have just returned from a short visit to Moldova, flying from Warsaw to Chișinău for Poland’s Corpus Christi school holidays. We had multiple reasons for the visit.
We had earlier considered doing another year abroad under the English Language Fellow program after our year in Poland. In fact, we had originally hoped to go to Romania, but there were no current openings. Moldova has an opening for next year, but my scary health problems during our deep winter in Poland made me fear I might not make it through a Moldovan winter, despite my advantage of arriving in Moldova still fairly fluent in Romanian. Public signage all over Chișinău was indeed almost fully in Romanian (not in Moldovan Cyrillic or Russian), and I enjoyed being able to converse much more readily in Romanian than I have been able to in Polish. (My ability to navigate written Polish is far ahead of my conversational ability.)
Our other reason for visiting Moldova was to make a pilgrimage to the village where Ms. Outlier’s Bessarabian German grandfather was born, and from which his family emigrated via Odessa to Canada and the Dakotas in the 1890s. Their rural village was named Neudorf, like dozens of German villages around the world. (There is a Neudorf village in Saskatchewan, and a poorly documented Neudorf cemetery in Eureka, South Dakota, originally settled by Germans from Russia). All the remaining Germans were expelled from Bessarabia in the 1940s, and Neudorf was renamed Carmanova (in Russian, Карманово).
Carmanova now lies in Transnistria, so near to the Ukrainian border that T-Mobile sent us “Welcome to Ukraine!” text messages when our phones came within range of their Ukraine cell towers. To get us there (and back), Moldova Tours was able to arrange for a private driver fluent in Russian, Romanian, and English, who had prior experience driving groups into the Transnistrian capital, Tiraspol, on their Soviet-era culture tours. But he had never been to very rural Carmanova and was curious about it. We ended up getting turned back twice at Russian Army checkpoints that could not handle international passports, and we had to wait in a long, slow line at the Grigoriopol checkpoint that could process our passports. They gave us a temporary insert but did not stamp our passports.
The rolling green hills of the Transnistrian countryside are quite lovely in June, with vast acres of foot-high sunflower sprouts. Several forks in the road had signposts directing us to the German settlements, and the road into the village featured a roughly made tall welcome sign with the year 1809 (when Neudorf was founded), its name in Cyrillic, Нойдорф, the year 1944, and its new name Карманово (from Карман ‘pocket’?). There was also a rock monument in the village inscribed to mark the 200th anniversary of its founding in 1809.
The village itself was very small and quiet. We were given a tour of the House of Culture by its cordial manager. It contained a curtained stage and auditorium, a disco hall, a barre-lined ballet studio, and several rooms for workshops of various kinds. We also visited the cemetery for Soviet soldiers who died there, billboards with the names and faces of local citizens who died between 1941 and 1945. We saw no sign of a former church. The little country store where we bought a bottle of Ukrainian water took only Transnistrian rubles, so our driver/translator handled the payment.
I’ve added a Moldova album to my Flickr site, Joel Abroad.
Far Outliers 