When I was a kid I read a National Geographic article about what was then the Soviet Socialist Republic of Moldavia, and I was engrossed.
This lushly photographed land of rich greens despite its strangeness reflected somehow the flatlands of my own youth, but I was particularly taken with the bit you can see on this map described as "Bessarabia", just to the left of the Crimean peninsula:
It might have been the novelty of finding an "Arabia" outside the Arab world, but I was transfixed.
Today Bessarabia has disappeared, carved up between the Republic of Moldova and Ukraine, but for a brief period in the early twentieth century before being engulfed by Romania and, then, Soviet Russia, it was the Republic of Bessarabia.
Its location has ensured it has been regularly invaded and overwhelmed, but such is the geographical logic of a community bordered by the Dniester and the Prut that it has returned several times from its vassal status. Oh, and it wasn't all flatlands: the lower reaches of the Carpathian mountains and the deep river gorges saw to that.
It's always been dirt poor: in Soviet days it was far and away the most backward of the western "republics", with eyewateringly low literacy rates and a peasant economy barely out of the Medieval period.
But it also had some surprises -- including this, what was, at the time, the longest bridge in Europe:
It's one of those strange places where relative agricultural prosperity somehow never translated into reasonable living standards for the whole population.
Massive grape and grain harvests, and vast herds of cattle, just seemed to disappear, certainly never much affecting the serf-like peasant classes (and yes, I know they were fishermen, not peasant farmers. I'm just using what I've got to hand).
I have never visited this part of the world, but I still harbour a childlike desire to go.
There is something about the romance of the words that is compelling: from Transnistria to Transylvania, Moldavia to Bessarabia. One day.
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