A handful of police officers from Ungheni put on folk costumes and set Moldovan dishes over the fire — hundreds of kilometres from home, across the Prut. On 20 June, members of the Ungheni Territorial Bureau of the International Police Association (IPA) took part in the international gastronomic contest “Culinary Adventures”, held in the commune of Ighiu, Alba County, Romania.
Under a banner bearing the flag of the Republic of Moldova and the words “IPA Ungheni Territorial Bureau”, the team laid out a table of traditional platters and cooked alongside teams from several countries, according to the bureau’s announcement. The Ungheni organisers wrote that they are proud to represent the Republic of Moldova and to promote traditional Moldovan dishes, and described the day as a source of pride and a special experience.
What the IPA is
The International Police Association was founded in 1950 by a British police officer, Arthur Troop, and chose a motto in Esperanto: “Servo per Amikeco”, meaning “service through friendship”. It is an apolitical organisation that today brings together more than 360,000 members from over 60 countries and connects police officers across borders through exchanges, meetings and social events.
The Republic of Moldova section was formally established in 2008, and its statute was registered with the Ministry of Justice in 2009; it numbers around 2,000 members, organised into territorial bureaus. Cooperation with Moldova’s police has also been confirmed at state level: in June 2025, the Ministry of Internal Affairs signed an agreement with the IPA, opening access for Moldovan officers to international courses and exchanges.
Gastronomy, across the Prut
For a border town like Ungheni, linked to Romania by the bridge over the Prut towards Iași, such a trip is more than a weekend outing. It is the kind of ordinary, person-to-person contact that keeps the relationship between the two banks alive — this time not through documents or projects, but through food cooked over an open fire and costumes embroidered in the traditional style.
The Ighiu contest gathers teams from several countries around their traditional cuisines. For the participants from Ungheni, the stake was one of image: to show, in a Transylvanian commune, what a Moldovan table looks like — and to do so wearing the symbolic “uniform” of an association whose only declared politics is friendship.