Bus-shelter mosaic, Ștefan Vodă

A roadside bus shelter with a mosaic at the northern entrance to the town of Ștefan Vodă, the seat of the like-named district in south-eastern Moldova, on the R30 road near the turn-off to Talmaza. The town was first called Chizil, then Suvorovo in the Soviet period, until 22 May 1990 when it was renamed in honour of Stephen the Great (Ștefan cel Mare); it first appeared on a map in 1884 and was resettled in 1909 as a small German colony. The bus stop, as everywhere in rural Bessarabia, was the locality's gateway to the wider world, and many were decorated in the 1960s–80s with colourful mosaics by local craftspeople. The work is anonymous and unlisted, though: neither the artist, the year, nor the panel's subject is on record. It is catalogued in the „Mosaics of Moldova” (Buretz) inventory, photographed there in 2020 by Ana Popa, but no openly-licensed photograph of the mosaic exists, so its imagery cannot be described from a verified source.

Tracks

Southern Moldova, Roadside Mosaics

Neighborhood

Ștefan Vodă