Chișinău, the city that quarried itself out of the ground.

01 The stone that is missing underneath

Some fifteen kilometres from the centre, beneath the town of Cricova, there are tunnels first dug in the fifteenth century. They were not opened to store anything: they were opened to extract limestone, and that limestone built Chișinău. It is an unusual relationship between a capital and its surroundings. Most cities import their material or buy it; this one tore it out of the ground beneath itself, and for centuries the quarry and the building site were the same project seen from opposite ends.

The stone is a pale limestone, soft to work, cut into blocks with a saw rather than chiselled. That explains two things at once: why the city grew quickly once the Russian Empire made it a provincial capital, and why its nineteenth-century facades are covered in mouldings, cornices and decorative bands that would have cost a fortune in granite. Ornament here is not an imported luxury. It is what a soft, carvable material allows.

02 A capital you recognise by its colour

The city's nickname —the white city— is not a poetic metaphor but a literal description of the material. Walk the centre in mid-afternoon light and the same range repeats from building to building: a pale, bone-tinted beige, with the joints showing and the corners rounded off by rain. There is no dominant exposed brick, no dark stone. Chișinău's palette was decided by a quarry, not by an architect.

The man who got the most out of it was Alexandru Bernardazzi, who signed more than thirty projects in the city between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the city hall, the water tower, schools, the courthouse. His work now reads as an unintentional catalogue of what that material made possible. Alongside it, other architects pushed the same repertoire somewhere stranger: the National Museum of Ethnography and Natural History, completed in 1905, applies a vocabulary of pointed arches and battlements to that pale limestone, unlike anything around it.

03 The hollow filled up with wine

When the digging stopped, what remained under the fields was a network of empty galleries with a property nobody had been looking for: a steady twelve degrees, all year, without spending a watt. In the 1950s those abandoned mines were converted into cellars. Cricova now has around a hundred and twenty kilometres of galleries reaching close to a hundred metres deep, and at Mileștii Mici, a little further south, the network runs beyond two hundred kilometres and holds more than two million bottles, the largest recorded wine collection in the world.

The detail that best explains what happened down there is that the galleries have street names, and the names are those of the wines stored along each stretch. This is not a tourist conceit: it is what happens when a network built for stone lorries is inherited whole and people need to find their way inside it. You enter by car or on a small train, keep to the right and read the signs. The quarry did not become a museum. It became a neighbourhood.

04 Rebuilt twice on the same plan

Here comes the tension that changes how you read everything above. In 1834 a plan was approved that split the city in two: the old part, with its irregular streets in the lower ground, and a new grid of long avenues climbing the slope. That layout is still the skeleton of the centre. What did not survive was almost everything standing on it.

In November 1940 an earthquake centred in Vrancea shook the city and damaged close to two thousand eight hundred buildings. Four years later, the war had destroyed around seventy per cent of the built fabric. Between 1947 and 1949 the architect Alexey Shchusev led the reconstruction plan, and the city went back up where it already stood, in the same stone as always. Chișinău is not an old capital that has been preserved: it is an old plan with young buildings on it.

That explains a sensation that is hard to name as you walk the centre. The proportions are nineteenth-century —long blocks, wide avenues, trees down both sides— but the buildings filling them are seventy or eighty years old. The city behaves like a mould that has been poured several times. You recognise the shape before the contents.

05 What Chișinău leaves you

On top of the stone came the green, and that is the third layer. The central park was laid out in 1818 and still keeps mulberries and acacias between a hundred and thirty and a hundred and eighty years old; the Dendrarium covers eighty-three hectares to the west; at Valea Morilor a pale stone stairway —the same limestone again— steps down in terraces to an artificial lake. A visitor who arrives expecting a grey capital spends the first day correcting that idea.

What you take from Chișinău is not a skyline or a monument but an operation: someone pulled a mountain of stone out from under the fields, stood it up in the shape of a city, and then found that the hole was useful too. Few capitals make it so clear what they are made of and where it came from. When you go down into the galleries and see the same material you have been looking at on facades for two days, you understand that up and down are not two separate visits. They are the same block, one in positive and one in negative.