In 1564, an Ottoman sultan wanted Moldavia defenceless. So its ruler burned down every fortress in the country, Suceava included, and moved the capital to a market town with no walls, no hills to defend, and no reason anyone would bother attacking it.
That town was Iași. It kept the title for nearly three centuries, building an entirely different kind of strength once the walls were gone.
The Making of a Capital
The order came from Suleiman the Magnificent, delivered through Voivode Alexandru Lăpușneanu: raze the fortified towns of Moldavia, or lose the throne. Lăpușneanu chose to keep the throne. Suceava, the old capital, burned along with the rest, its walls levelled specifically so the country could no longer defend itself.
Iași had never been a stronghold. It was a trading town on flat, unremarkable ground, useful for commerce and nothing in particular for war. That made it, by 1564, the safest possible choice: a capital an empire had no reason to fear. Over the following three centuries, the city built its reputation on precisely the things a fortress never needs. Culture. Print. Argument.
The City of Firsts
Iași collected national firsts the way other cities collect monuments. The first Romanian-language stage play, in 1816. The first natural history museum in the country, in 1834. The first public library in Moldavia, in 1830. The first modern institution of higher education east of the Carpathians, the Academia Mihăileană. Romania’s first university, founded here by princely decree in 1860, still bears the name of the ruler who signed it, Alexandru Ioan Cuza. It first occupied a boyar’s house in the city centre; the grand building it moved into on Copou Hill in 1897 is the one carrying its name today.
The city’s literary circle, Junimea, gathered writers who would go on to define Romanian letters: Mihai Eminescu, Ion Creangă, Ion Luca Caragiale, Titu Maiorescu. Eminescu himself lived for a spell in a monk’s cell at one of the city’s monasteries, of all places, while sitting on an exam committee at a school founded two centuries earlier by a prince obsessed with printing presses.
The Church That Holds a Secret
That monastery was Trei Ierarhi, built between 1637 and 1639 by Prince Vasile Lupu. Its entire exterior is carved in stone, floor to roofline, in thirty-plus horizontal bands of ornament that never repeat: Persian vases, Russian-style colonnettes, Armenian and Georgian geometric patterns, Turkish and Arab niches, Gothic and Baroque borrowings, all cut directly into the walls rather than painted on them. Nothing else in Romania looks quite like it.
Inside, Lupu installed the first printing press in Moldavia, and in 1643 it produced the first book ever printed in Moldavia, a collection of religious teachings by Metropolitan Varlaam. He also installed a clock in the bell tower, in 1654, the first public clock anywhere in the Romanian principalities.
The clock is gone. During a 19th-century restoration, it was shipped to France for repairs and never came back. Nobody at the monastery today can tell you exactly where it ended up.
What the church did keep is stranger still: the tombs of Prince Vasile Lupu’s own family sit on one side of the entrance hall, and on the other, side by side, the remains of Prince Dimitrie Cantemir and Alexandru Ioan Cuza, the man who united Moldavia and Wallachia into modern Romania. Three centuries of Romanian history, buried a few metres apart, inside a building most visitors walk past for its façade alone.
Losing the Title
By 1859, Iași was doing well enough that historians now argue it was better administered than Wallachia. When Alexandru Ioan Cuza united the two principalities that year, both Iași and Bucharest briefly held capital status together. That lasted three years.
In 1862, the decision came down to keep only one capital, and Bucharest won, not for any administrative advantage, but reportedly because it was better known abroad than Iași. The city that had spent three centuries building a reputation through culture rather than power lost its capital status to a rival with better name recognition.
It briefly took the title back in 1916, when Bucharest fell under German occupation during the First World War and the Romanian government relocated to Iași for two years. Then it handed the role back again, this time for good.
The City Today
Iași is still known, half-officially, as the seven-hilled city: Cetățuia, Galata, Copou, Bucium-Păun, Șorogari, Repedea, and Breazu, a Rome-adjacent comparison the city has never been shy about drawing. It holds Romania’s oldest botanical garden, its third-largest population at roughly 272,000 people, and two formal titles: Cultural Capital of Romania, an unofficial designation nobody disputes, and Historical Capital of Romania, recognised by a law parliament passed unanimously in 2018 and signed into force by the president in January 2019, on the eve of the anniversary of the 1859 Union.
Nicolae Iorga, the historian, once said there should be no Romanian who doesn’t know this city.
Most, if pressed, could tell you almost nothing about it beyond the fact that it once was a capital. That gap between reputation and actual knowledge is, in its own way, very on brand for a place that got the job in the first place by being easy to overlook.
Visiting
The Palace of Culture, built between 1906 and 1925 on the site of the old princely court, anchors the city centre and houses four museums under one roof: history, art, ethnography, and science and technology.
A combined ticket covering all four runs 100 lei at the counter, or 90 lei bought online. Hours vary between the museums themselves and the palace’s grand representative halls, so it’s worth checking the current schedule online before planning a full day around it.
Online tickets can be booked directly through the palace, or as part of a guided visit that folds in other stops nearby.
Trei Ierarhi sits a short walk away on Bulevardul Ștefan cel Mare și Sfânt, the city’s old princely street, alongside the Metropolitan Cathedral and several other churches from the same era. The stone façade is worth circling slowly, ideally more than once.
Iași connects easily to the rest of Moldavia: Bucovina’s painted monasteries lie roughly two to three hours northwest, and Ipotești, Eminescu’s childhood home, is closer still. For a city built on being easy to pass by, it makes a surprisingly good base for everything nearby.
For those who’d rather not drive themselves, a guided day trip covers the main monasteries in one outing.
Iași has a wide range of places to stay, from the old center to the quieter university side.
Images: Adobe Stock license.
This article is also available in French:
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