Bucharest: Searching for the Song
You find me in Bucharest on a cold, icy evening. A few other plucky souls and I have gathered at Gara de Nord station here in Romania’s capital, waiting anxiously for a platform for the train to Chișinău. Hopefully it’s warm inside for our upcoming 14-hour journey.
A tourist train this is not. Nobody is hanging around for selfies or gazing at the glamorous train before us, because glamorous this isn’t. This is the old school way to travel into Eastern Europe, the Cold War era way of travelling on carriages constructed in East Germany before the Berlin Wall fell. Sure, flights exist, and long-distance buses can do the journey in almost half the time, but there are three reasons people take this route.
One is money: this is the cheapest way to travel between the capital cities, especially for those who can also save on a night’s accommodation. The second is the nostalgia of the trip, the authenticity of the travel and the history of this special journey, and the experience on board that train or plane can’t replicate.
The other reason, our reason, is because of a certain little song about a certain little train.
We are here to understand the history that made ‘Trenulețul’ Moldova’s most iconic Eurovision entry.
I have clear memories of seeing ‘Trenulețul’ live at Eurovision, during the Jury show of the first Semi Final in Turin. Ukraine had already performed to a large reception, with Kalush Orchestra heavily applauded both before and after their emotional performance that ultimately secured victory. Moldova soon followed in the Pala Alpitour, and I have never ever in my time following the Contest seen a more joyous and more lively crowd in my life, enormous compared even to the support Kalush Orchestra received. As soon as the fiddle melody churned out, the crowd were on their feet, starting their own hora, conga-line and feel-good party, and turning a Moldovan tale into Eurovision folklore.
That performance and the crowd reaction exceeded anybody’s expectations. This was a hit. Ultimately, those three minutes at the Jury Final in Turin stuck with us so much that “Hey-ho! Let’s Go!” became a family catchphrase, and the song’s shock reaction that night was the main driving force for ESC Insight starting work on the Eurovision Audience Poll in 2023.
It’s time to witness if living and breathing the song for real, for an overnight adventure, lives up to the music video’s promised reality.
Darkness Through Romania and A Vision of Unity
On paper, ‘Trenulețul’ is a Eurovision entry on the most innocent of topics, a song about a little train. A little train that returned after the route was lost, cancelled as part of measures to curb the spread of COVID-19. Its return ended a division of Moldova and Romania that hasn’t been felt since USSR times, bringing Moldova closer to the nation it shares the most with.
Beyond the train, however, both the lyrics and the music video refer to the existence of two nations and a border between Romania and Moldova, and ‘Trenulețul’ directly questions how much this border actually exists.
“An old country, a new country. It’s like one, it’s like two. Both apart, both together. It’s like two, it’s like one”
The notion of Romania and Moldova being one united nation has been gaining ground in local discussions. Under Soviet rule, the language of the nation was called Moldovan, and argued that it was a separate beast from Romanian to the southwest, outside direct Soviet control. But Moldova has now, as an independent state, re-aligned itself with Romania, with a 2023 parliamentary vote decreeing that any mention of the language being known as Moldovan had to be replaced with Romanian. January 15th, the day we arrived in Chișinău, is National Culture Day in Moldova and Romania, with the nations celebrating on the same day in memory of their shared National Poet.
Indeed, aligning with Romania is a hot political topic in Moldova, and support has increased within Moldova for those supporting unification from roughly 15-20 percent ten years ago to polling over 40 percent in recent years. Maia Sandu, Moldovan President, is one who personally supports unification with Romania, arguing it is getting “more and more difficult for a small country like Moldova to survive as a democracy, as a sovereign country, and of course to resist Russia.”
However, this question isn’t on the active political agenda without a majority of the Moldovan population also on board. Many more Moldovans are seeking a different unification, one with the European Union. Since June 22nd 2022, Moldova has been an official candidate member of the EU, with polling showing a majority supporting EU membership and a Moldovan goal of EU accession in 2028.
While there was an era of the Eurovision Song Contest where the unification of Europe was an inspiration for songs across the continent, EU integration was not the topic of Moldova’s 2022 entry. EU membership might be the more practical union partnership Moldova is aiming for, but it is not the one pulling on the heartstrings.
The Border: Engineering and Geopolitical Friction
Any tug-of-war between Moldova’s eastern and western influences is best witnessed by the engineering history of the Romanian/Moldovan border. Not only is the border between Romania and Moldova an EU border, meaning full passport checks on entry and exit, but it’s also where train travel itself changes form.
Romania’s train network uses the standard gauge, with a 1,435 mm spacing between the inner rails. Used by 60 percent of the world’s railways, it would be feasible for a train starting at the border town of Ungheni to travel on rails all the way to Thurso in northern Scotland.
But that ends here. Trains have been in this region for approximately 150 years, but it wasn’t the Romanian trains that were here first. Instead, train travel reached Moldova from the east, expanding in from the Russian Empire that controlled the region at the time. Through the 1860s and 1870s, train lines expanded westwards, to and eventually beyond Chișinău, ending in Ungheni.
The bridge-building process was delayed, and the 1875 design was heavily damaged by flooding. Gustave Eiffel, yes, him of the tower fame, built the redesign with a similar lattice metal structure to his most iconic work. In 1877, the bridge across the River Prut was opened, linking the Russian Empire-controlled Bessarabia (most of which comprises modern Moldova) with Romanian-controlled territory under Ottoman rule.
Three days later, the Russian Empire used the bridge to transfer troops into Romania, starting the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78. The conclusion of this war saw Romania, Serbia and Montenegro able to claim independence from the Ottoman Empire, with Bulgaria de facto also separating from Ottoman control.
But by this point, Romania was already a standard gauge nation, and today’s Moldova was stuck on the wider Russian system, with 1,520 mm instead of 1,435 mm between the train tracks.
Hundreds and hundreds of differently aligned train wheels at the Romanian-Moldovan border (Photo: Ben Robertson, ESC Insight)
Culturally Zdob și Zdub spoke about how it felt sometimes like one nation and sometimes two. Here at the border, this process magnifies the fact that these are two different countries.
It meant that, after crossing the Eiffel bridge into Moldovan territory, the train came to a halt for one of the rarest experiences in rail travel, in what seemed like eternal darkness. After passport control shook us out of our slumber at 4:00 am, while half-asleep, the entire train gets lifted up, the old wheels are decoupled, and the new wheels literally roll in along the new tracks and slot perfectly in place in the undercarriage. You stay on the train all the time while men scurry around and under and even inside some of the cabins to lock all the wheels in place. It takes two hours to complete this for the entire train before it goes on its merry way through the plains of Moldova.
Some of the four person sleeper cabins also include the locking systems for the train carriage to the wheels. (Photo: Ben Robertson, ESC Insight)
I remember these two hours well, as witnessing this engineering marvel comes with a catch: the ‘gravity toilets’ are locked while the train is stationary, a cruel irony for anyone woken up by the 4:00 AM passport checks.
But that’s fair enough, because excrement from the train is deposited onto the tracks below, and the people servicing the train in the depths of darkness deserve much better.
Moldova: Folklore and The Great Pivot
These engineering delays at the border aren’t mentioned in the song about said train journey that we all know and love.
Because this little song of ‘Prietenia’ (Friendship, the name of said train) was not a purpose-written, songwriter-camp export to take Eurovision by turbo-folk-punk storm. This was the actual song used to celebrate the return of the opening of the train opening between Chișinău to Bucharest once more, and the original version of the song included lyrics more explicit about the importance and the coming together of Romania and Moldova, with numerous versions were submitted by the composers to ensure they would have a complicit Eurovision-ready version, ultimately removing any reference to there being “no boundaries” between Romania and Moldova in the final edit.
That this project turned into a submission for Eurovision was a late pivot, and it was only just before song nominations closed that the song was submitted to what became one of Eurovision’s most unusual selection processes. As per usual, Moldova required their 28 acts who had submitted songs to participate in a live audition process, the aim of which was to shortlist for a March National Final.
But there was no National Final. ‘Trenulețul’ was the favourite of the assembled five-person jury watching the auditions, and the broadcaster decided that, with COVID-19 cases increasing again in January 2022, internally selecting Zdob și Zdub & Frații Advahov was the best option.
This decision to effectively internally select their Eurovision entry can not be held in isolation from the dramatic step change that occurred within the broadcaster in the build-up to Eurovision that year.
Snap parliamentary elections in 2021 saw President Maia Sandu’s pro-EU Party of Action and Solidarity gain overall control of parliament, pushing through reforms to public service media within its first months in power. Part of these measures was to give the government greater control over state-funded broadcasters, and new leadership was brought in, dismissing the director general and deputies.
The effective internal selection of a pro-unification song immediately after the government change isn’t just a notable coincidence; it’s a notable shift in Eurovision’s direction. Moldova’s Eurovision entries in the years before included DoReDos, the former New Wave winners hailing from breakaway Transnistria, and Natalia Gordienko, a singer who became director general of Russkoe Radio in Moldova. The entries for these acts were written by the so-called Dream Team, with Russia’s larger-than-life pop music guru Philip Kirkorov part of the circus. Indeed, the release party for Moldova’s 2021 entry ’Sugar’ was a glitzy celebration of Kirkorov’s work broadcast from Moscow, with a who’s who of Russian stars in attendance, rather than anything to do with Moldova.
These years brought big budgets and flashy performances, but history struggles to show these as a cultural showcase of Moldovan talent. Instead, Moldova was used by the rich and powerful as a tool to participate in the Song Contest and gain their own soft power from it.
‘Trenulețul’ couldn’t have been any more different to the world that came before it, raw, folk-driven and proudly local with a tale that could only come from Moldova itself.
Chișinău, Real History and Eurovision History
Moldova has had more success in Eurovision history, as seen on the scoreboard. Juries in 2022 placed Moldova 20th on 14 points, so we could argue that Sunstroke Project’s 3rd place in 2017, or Zdob și Zdub’s 6th place debut for Moldova in 2005 were better results. But from artists we have spoken to backstage, it is the impact of Moldova’s 2022 entry that has been the most iconic and inspirational one.
Each carriage had a coal-fire on board that provided all the heating (Photo: Ben Robertson, ESC Insight)
The actual train journey is also an iconic and inspirational travel adventure. But be prepared for a coal-heated carriage where your temperature control is how far you can prop the window open. Be prepared for four bunks in a room, a few square metres wide, short enough that my 5-foot-11 torso couldn’t stretch out fully, and my night’s sleep was compromised more by the realisation there was nothing stopping a possible fall from the top bunk than early morning passport shenanigans.
I also feel misled by the music video. The romantic travel image portrayed was of a glorious party on board, and yes, there is a bar with a wide selection of snacks and drinks, but the only ones I witnessed using it were us diehards taking the long way to Moldova’s national final. Fair enough, of course, for a midweek journey through a particularly chilly mid-winter.
Hard to resist not dancing along these corridors (Photo: Ben Robertson, ESC Insight)
We arrived at Chișinău’s station about an hour late, just after half past nine in the morning. It was sub-zero when we arrived, and Chișinău’s station was eerily cold and quiet compared to the hustle and bustle of Bucharest, where we left. Whereas the Romanian capital had four trains leaving roughly every 20 minutes, Chișinău currently has four trains a day listed in the schedule. Two head to Romania, one heads to the border, and one heads to Ukraine.
Train travel may not be king anymore in this part of the world, with the marshrutka minibus network the main way of getting between towns and villages, but it is one of history and cultural significance beyond three minutes in Turin. If you are ever making the journey between Chișinău and Bucharest, I implore you to take the train if you have time. The train makes travel an adventure and a living, breathing history lesson, and if you are reading this, you’re likely the kind of traveller who won’t be able to make the journey without that fiddle melody playing on a loop in your head.
But be quick, the EU are pumping in 33 million Euros of investment on this very train line, so perhaps it will all be seamlessly integrated onto Europe’s standard gauge some years in the future. Much like Moldova might be integrated into wider European cooperation in years to come.
Tickets on the Bucharest-Chișinău train cost roughly 29 Euros per person, based on sharing a four-person cabin.