…It was an Easter night. The church was bathing in the flames of candles – the religious service was being held. There was a guest, who came behind everyone, and whose names was only whispered – Tobultoc. He was tall, smoldering, with a moustache as black as ember and curious eyes. He held the hat in his hands lost in his own thoughts. At one moment his eyes stopped on a little peasant girl, tormented and pale in face, and next to her – a little girl that was so thin that the skin looked almost transparent. The troubled woman seemed not to listen to the service, and her eyes, full of tears, were clouded.

When the service ended, Tobultoc came out from behind the woman, greeted her and asked why she was so upset. Sighing, the woman told him that her husband had been taken into the army forcibly , and the news came to her that he had perished in an unjust battle with the Ottomans. And she remained the widowed woman with 5 children. She worked for the Boyar in the village, but he still had nothing to take care of a house full of children. Tobultoc found out where her house was and left in a hurry.

Sometime later the outlaw was already knocking on the Boyar’s door. Entering the House unwelcomed, with two guns in his hands, it took him only a few moments to take two bags full of yolks, to collect from the Boyar’s table all the dishes prepared for Easter in a tablecloth, and to make himself invisible.

At this time the widow, along with her eldest child, was slowly approaching the house. The woman was grieved, and unwittingly kept crying. She saw light in the window of the house, covered with bovine intestines, and got frightened. She walked by, thinking she’d missed the house in the dark. But the girl was pulling her sleeve: “Where are we going, Mother, here’s our hut!” Tiptoeing, they entered the house, and what did they see? There sat the unknown from the church and fed the youngest child, and the others, huddled around him, feasted on everything.

Note: Tudor Olteanu, nicknamed Tobultoc, was a real person and is considered a national hero. He had a short life (1805-1835), but troubled, which left a deep imprint in Moldovan folklore. Caught several times, he was lucky to escape from the military prison in Chisinau. Caught again by the gendarmes following a denunciation in late 1834,  he was beaten and mocked several months. The punitive measure was decided by Count Vorontsov himself – the governor of Bessarabia – 50 whips and chains for life in Siberia. But on the basis of a secret dispatch sent to Chisinau, Tobultoc’s death was prescribed. In the spring of 1835 the outlaw was beaten with a lead whip in front of the crowd on the Hay Square (the current Republican Stadium) to death. At night the soldiers dug a pit outside the city, and, without a priest, without family and without friends, secretly buried him. Back then the place was deserted, now it has become the center of the city.

…”In Chisinau, in the northern part of the so-called German market, two secular poplars grow alongside. They say that between themTobultoc is buried . The brothers planted a tree at his head and at his feet, because the police and the clergy did not allow a cross to be placed at his grave. “(I. Yazimirsky)

On the grounds of D. Moldovanu’s work “Outlaw Tobultoc”