Belarus Photo Slideshow
Photos by Tata Nadaryan
former soviet union
Homemade Wine and Salted Pig's Fat
The signature product of Moldova is their wine. The larger wineries have imported modern production techniques and are producing excellent wine at very inexpensive prices. Still, any Moldovan worth their salt has a large store of homemade wine from the massive barrel or two in their basement.
A Stroll through Odessa
Odessa has a severely Victorian character about it; the lampposts, sidewalks and infrastructure are something out of 1812 Hyde Park. The train station and opera house are Crimean War-era. The parks are green and manicured. This place is fancy, European, cosmopolitan and cultivated.
The Country that Doesn’t Exist: Transdniestria
One of the oddest relics of the breakup of the Soviet Union is the Transdniester Moldovan Republic, known locally as Pridnistrovia. As part of the ethnic gerrymandering in the Soviet Union, Moscow added a Russian and Ukrainian populated slice of land on the eastern bank of the Dniester River to the original Moldovan Soviet Republic. This was part of a larger policy of diluting ethnic concentrations in all of the republics to weaken any indigenous nationalism.