Moldavia & Bucovina

Long before the principality, the Moldavian hills were home to the Cucuteni culture, whose painted Neolithic pottery is named after a village near Iași. Moldavia itself was founded in the mid-14th century by voivodes from Maramureș, Dragoș and Bogdan I, who broke free of Hungary. Its early capitals were Baia, Siret and Suceava. Stephen the Great, who ruled from 1457 to 1504, fought Hungarians, Poles, Tatars and above all the Ottomans, winning at Vaslui in 1475, and built dozens of stone churches and monasteries; the Orthodox Church canonised him in 1992. Under his son Petru Rareș, in the 1530s and 1540s, the Bucovina churches were painted inside and out.

Moldavia eventually accepted Ottoman overlordship, and its capital moved to Iași in the 16th century. In 1775 the Habsburgs annexed the north-west, which they named Bucovina, the "beech land", and settled with Germans, Poles and Ukrainians alongside Romanians and a large Jewish population; its capital, Czernowitz, now lies in Ukraine. In 1812 Russia took Bessarabia, the land east of the Prut, and in 1859 Moldavia and Wallachia united under Alexandru Ioan Cuza, a Moldavian.

During the First World War, with Bucharest occupied, Iași served as Romania's capital, and the front ran along Vrancea, where the battles of Mărășești and Mărăști were fought in 1917. In June 1941 the Iași pogrom killed thousands of the city's Jews. After 1940 the north of Bucovina became part of the Soviet Union. Under communism Galați's steelworks and Bacău's factories grew, but the region has stayed the poorest part of Romania.

Moldavians are known in Romania for a soft, sing-song accent, for their humour and for their literature: Iași was the home of the Junimea literary society, the national poet Mihai Eminescu, and the storyteller Ion Creangă, whose childhood memoirs of the Neamț village of Humulești every Romanian reads at school.

Orthodoxy is intensely lived here. The Neamț valleys hold the greatest concentration of monasteries in the country, with large communities of nuns at Agapia and Văratec, and the October pilgrimage to the relics of St Parascheva in Iași draws hundreds of thousands. There are also Roman Catholic communities around Bacău, Neamț and Iași, including the Csángós, who speak an archaic form of Hungarian.

Folk traditions remain strong. Bucovina is famous for Easter eggs painted with fine geometric patterns in wax-resist dyes, for embroidered costumes and for decorated houses; at New Year, young men in the villages of the Trotuș valley and elsewhere perform the bear dance in real bearskins, and masked groups go from house to house.

Iași, with about 270,000 people, is the region's capital in all but name, with several universities, large hospitals and a growing IT and outsourcing industry. Galați, a Danube port of about 220,000, has Romania's largest steel plant and a shipyard; Bacău, Botoșani, Suceava, Piatra Neamț, Focșani and Vaslui are county towns of roughly 60,000 to 140,000.

Much of the population still lives in villages, farming small plots on the plateau and in the valleys, and emigration has been heavy: whole villages depend on money from relatives working in Italy, Spain or Germany. The north-east has the lowest income per head of any Romanian region. Tourism, forestry and small manufacturing support Bucovina and Neamț.

Life follows the church calendar and the farming year, with Sunday services, markets and family feasts central. The region's long-running complaint is its isolation — the lack of motorways linking it to the rest of Romania — and the new roads now under construction are watched closely.

Moldavian food is hearty and generous. Tochitură moldovenească is a pan-fried stew of pork, sausage and sometimes offal, served with mămăligă, a fried egg and grated sheep's cheese. Ciorbă rădăuțeană, from Rădăuți in Bucovina, is a sour chicken soup enriched with sour cream, egg and vinegar. Sarmale are rolled in cabbage or vine leaves, and Bucovina's mountain streams supply trout.

Sweets include poale-n brâu, pastries folded around sweetened cheese, and the Moldavian mucenici baked for 9 March, figure-of-eight rolls glazed with honey and walnuts. Cozonac sweet bread and plum țuică appear at every feast.

Moldavia produces much of Romania's wine. Cotnari, near Iași, is known for Grasă de Cotnari, a sweet white, and for Fetească Albă, Frâncușă and Tămâioasă Românească; Huși has Zghihară de Huși, a crisp white; and Vrancea, with the vineyards of Panciu, Odobești and Cotești, is the country's largest wine area.

The painted monasteries of Bucovina lie in the valleys west of Suceava. Voroneț, near Gura Humorului, has a Last Judgement on its west wall and a deep blue background known as "Voroneț blue"; Humor, Moldovița with its Siege of Constantinople, Arbore, and Sucevița complete the usual circuit. Putna Monastery, Stephen the Great's burial place, is further north. Suceava has the princely citadel and St John the New Monastery, and the region's mountain towns include Câmpulung Moldovenesc and the spa of Vatra Dornei.

Iași's sights include the Palace of Culture, a neo-Gothic building housing four museums, the Three Hierarchs Church with its carved stone façade, the Metropolitan Cathedral, Copou Park and the botanic garden. In Neamț, Piatra Neamț has a museum of Cucuteni pottery and a cable car, Târgu Neamț has the hilltop Neamț Citadel and Creangă's house at Humulești, and the monasteries of Neamț, Agapia and Văratec lie in the forests nearby.

West of Piatra Neamț, the Bicaz dam holds back Lake Izvorul Muntelui below the Ceahlău massif, and the road climbs into the Bicaz Gorge, with limestone walls rising hundreds of metres above it. In the south-east, Galați has a long promenade on the Danube, and the Vrancea hills hold the Mărășești mausoleum and the vineyards of Panciu.