Bill Fink January 9, 2018
A breakaway, ex-Soviet region that issues its own passports and isn’t recognized by the rest of the world? That’s only half the appeal of visiting this nation in limbo.
Small men in big hats boarded our bus to ask for passports. Our guide hissed out a warning: “No photos! No photos!” We were about to cross a border that isn’t a border, into a country that isn’t one. As the guards finally waved us through, our guide smiled with relief. “Welcome to Transnistria,” she said in Russian-accented English, “A place that does not eeeeks-zeeest.”
Unrecognized by the international community, Transnistria, aka the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic, is a skinny Rhode Island-sized breakaway enclave from Moldova that borders Ukraine. Ethnically Russian, it is enthusiastically Soviet in spirit, circa 1957, where Lenin statues and propaganda posters punctuate streets lined with decrepit state apartment complexes.
It prints its own money and issues passports—neither of which are accepted anywhere outside its borders. There’s limited internet, few places accept credit cards, and the ATMs are “connected to what, who knows?”
So what’s a traveler to do in this state-sized, retro-communist theme park?
After asking a local teen to take my photo, I swam to the middle of the Dniester River. Much of the river’s path marks the border between still-bitter rivals Moldova and Transnistria, an unofficial divide where hundreds of people were killed in the 1992 Transnistria War, and with a future still very much in doubt.
But for that day at least, all was peaceful and friendly. The cheerful kid waved that he had completed the photos, so I swam in to thank him and he answered in English under the proud gaze of his mother.
I walked back to our hotel with a smile on my face—and with the sneaking suspicion that a small man in a big hat, who stopped every time that I did, was following me.
Welcome to Transnistria, a country that very much exists—for now.
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