The Armenian community has left a serious mark on the history and geography of Chisinau. In fact, the Armenian community feels honored that there is a street here that marks their identity and claims that the Armenian Apostolic Church “Holy Mother of God” in Chisinau, together with the Armenian street, is the place where all Armenians belonging to this area and who left their homes are reunited.  And some curious moments will be described below:

1. Historical sources speak about the existence of two Armenian streets. The first one (unofficial) was on the right side of the Bîc river (the old part of the town). The second, which was established in the new part of the city in 1835, when the new urban plan of Chisinau was being finalised, can still be easily found today on the street map of the capital of the Republic of Moldova.

2. On 4 January 1817, describing the city of Chisinau, the English traveller William Mac-Michael wrote: “Among the strange crowd you could distinguish here (…) many Armenians, so numerous that they occupied a whole street. In the midst of the crowd (…) the carriage of an elegant and beautiful child, the daughter of the Armenian vicar, drove slowly along the narrow and sinful street (…) Such was the state of things … in the lower quarter of the bazaar (…)”.

3. The lack of official street names in the old part of the city was due to the fact that most of them were inhabited by ethnic groups, being named after their inhabitants, and looked more like ethnic neighbourhoods. Ștefan Ciobanu’s claim that Armenians in the early 20th century were “ethnic groups” is not true. The Armenians lived on their street in the early 19th century – leads us to conclude that this could only be the street “covered in dust in summer, mud in spring and autumn, and darkness at night”, on which the Armenian Church “St. Mother of God” was built, which was also called the Old Church.

4. The name ‘Old’ was later extended both to the church and to the street, which made the difference between the Armenian street in the old and the new part of the town, one longitudinal and the other transversal.

5. The beginning of the second Armenian street is linked to the transfer to Chisinau, after 1812, of the Armenian Archdiocese, established in 1809, by an ucaz of Tsar Alexander I, on the territory of the Principalities of Moldavia and Muntenia.

6. In 1813, for the Armenian Episcopal House in Chișinău, but also for the construction of parish houses, the governor of Basarabia assigned to the Armenian Archdiocese a territory with an area of about 25 thousand desetine of land (about 27 ha – n.n.), later included between the current streets bd. Stephen the Great and Holy, 31 August 1989, Tighina and Armenian Streets. The area of land made available constituted the “neighbourhood” occupied by the Armenian Archbishop Grigor Zakarian (1809-1828) in Chisinau. It was also called the Armenian Metropolitanate, and the archbishop had the status of metropolitan. According to the location project, the area of land given to the Archbishopric was called “Armenian courtyard” and was enclosed by a fence as the Russian denominations – Aрмянское подворье and Aрмянская ограда – tell us. The territory of the Archdiocese belonged to the monastery of Echmiadzin, the location of the Supreme Patriarch and All Armenian Catholic. The Bishop’s house inside the courtyard was located somewhere in the middle, now Bulgarian Street.

7. In 1813, the first project of the city began to be drawn up, entrusted by the civil governor of Basarabia, Scarlat Sturza, to the governmental architect Mihail Ozmidov. The works for the formation of Chișinău as the capital of the province of Basarabia lasted until August 9, 1834, when the final plan of the city, with an orthogonal street layout, different from the local tradition, was approved by Nicholas I. The streets were named in 1818, when A. N. Bahmetiev, the military governor of Podolia, made a sketch of the city with the location of the streets up to the present M. Kogalniceanu Street. The name was given to the Armenian street in the “upper part” of the town, which was named after the immediate location of the Armenian Archdiocese. Near it, in 1825, the New Square (today Central) was opened, with movable and quite beautiful commercial spaces for that period. It was here that all merchants in Chisinau were obliged to sell their goods, and they were forbidden to trade near their houses in the old part of the city. Attached to the position of their own shops, 2000 Armenian, Bulgarian, Greek and Jewish owners expressed their dissatisfaction in a letter of 18 July 1826 to the civil governor of Bessarabia, V. F. Tishkovsky. However, things did not change, and the old market gradually lost its significance, as did the “lower part” of the town.

8. In 1902, portions of the new and old Armenian Street were paved with granite brought from Podolia between 1888 and 1889. After the construction of the aqueduct by the engineer Haris on 15 December 1892, the Armenian street in the “upper part” of the town was supplied with water from the springs of the Great Fountain and the Artesian. Residents of the street who used the water had to pay for it. For example, those who drank up to 300 buckets of water a day were charged 25 kopecks, and those who drank more than 1,000 buckets a day only 12 kopecks. If the water was used for watering animals, only 1 kopeck per day was charged.

9. A report of 29 December 1921 stated that the ‘foul-smelling’ dirt ‘reaches below all limits’. Stefan Ciobanu himself, by stating that “the most beautiful part of the city starts from Armenească Street”, seems to draw a line in this direction, showing us the existence of two worlds.

10. On 29 February 1924, all the streets of Chisinau were renamed. The “upper” Armenian street was named the White Fortress, later in honour of Marshal Pietro Badoglio, and the “lower” one – Gh. Asachi. However, by inertia, both the population and the Romanian administration referred to them as Armenească and Veche Armenească. After June 28, 1940, the Soviet authorities restored the names of the streets existing until 1924. On 12 April 1941, when the city of Chisinau was divided into three urban districts: Stalinski, Krasnoarmeiski and Leninski, Armenian Street was part of the last one. That was also when the plan to rebuild Chisinau in Soviet style began to be implemented. As far as Armenian Street is concerned, after the decision of 7 December 1949, taken by the Soviet authorities regarding the nationalisation of building No. 47, i.e. the Armenian Diocesan House, there was nothing in this perimeter that reminded of the Armenian element once perpetuated in this territory. Today, with a length of 1.8 km, the Armenian street in Chisinau is one of the symbols that ‘tell’ not only the relationship between time and history, but also the history of the development of a socio-identity space in which the Armenian community was inscribed.

(From the work of Lidia PRISAC, PhD in history and
Ion Valer XENOFONTOV, PhD in History)