Bucharest/Chișinǎu, 2026
‘Prietenia’ means ‘friendship’ in Romanian. It is also the name of the night train linking Bucharest to Chișinău. Moldovan carriages dating back to the Soviet era, with a track gauge different from the European standard, a fourteen-hour journey through Bessarabia.
The train departs at 7.30 pm from the Romanian capital. God, in the Balkans, seems to have returned with greater ambitions than before and in no uncertain terms. Inside the Catedrala Mântuirii Neamului (Cathedral of the Salvation of the People), the seats are upholstered in red velvet with gilded details; outside, one of the highest poverty rates in Europe.
At the border, in Ungheni, in the middle of the night, the train stops and is lifted off the ground. The bogies are changed — a legacy of the Soviet railway system, built on tracks wider than those in Europe. We stay on board whilst this happens. The train remains suspended in the darkness for almost two hours, and the sounds we hear make sleep impossible; then it sets off again.
January 2026. Chișinău is also described as the European capital least visited by tourists — no one goes there without a specific reason. I wanted to go and see what remains when an era ends but does not disappear entirely.
The Moldovan capital preserves, in its buildings, its wide streets and its oversized public spaces, the memory of a world order that has ended but has not disappeared – or perhaps that is just what we, as Westerners, think. Walking through it in winter, with the fog blurring the outlines, was like moving through something that was still deciding what to become, struggling to conform to an era that does not belong to it.
I wasn’t looking for anything in particular. Or rather — I was trying to understand what remains when something comes to an end. The Prietenia is a journey through space and time.
It takes you where you want to go, but it takes all night, and in the process, it lifts you off the ground.