Bălți

Bălți stands where the Răuțel joins the Răut, amid the wetlands from which its name is commonly derived. A Moldavian market settlement grew here in the northern country between the Prut and Dniester. The date of its beginnings is disputed, but travellers and military accounts mention Bălți in the seventeenth century.

In 1652 Timish Khmelnytsky, son of the Cossack hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky, stopped here; an Italian traveller described the settlement in 1657. Saint Nicholas Church was completed in 1795. The Treaty of Bucharest brought Bălți and eastern Moldavia under Russian rule in 1812. Tsar Alexander I visited in 1818, the year the settlement received town status. Its market and river setting helped shape the town that emerged from the surrounding Moldavian countryside over the centuries.