Update — 23 October 2026. The Municipality Days ended on 31 August. On 27 August the twinning agreements with Tulcea and Izmit were signed, and the list of twin towns reached 23. The text below has been updated.
The Municipality Days of Ungheni opened on 20 August with an exhibition of interwar photographs and the launch of the museum’s history bulletin, exactly on the day marking 564 years since the settlement’s first documentary record. The programme stretched over nearly two weeks — from 20 to 31 August. Beyond the shows and the fair, it was built around a date with a precise historical meaning and a few moments worth knowing.
Why the celebration opens on 20 August
The date is not chosen at random. According to the City Hall’s history page, the settlement’s first documentary record dates from August 1462, in a charter (uric) of Ștefan cel Mare that mentions „satul Unghiul” (the village of Unghiul), lying „lower than Fîlfoe, on the Jijia”. The settlement belonged to a certain „pan Bratul”. From that document to 2026, 564 years have passed — the age that the start of the celebration symbolically marks.
Today’s name came later: the form „Ungheni” appears in documents only in 1645. The very first name, „Unghiul” (the Angle), says everything about the lay of the place — here the Prut makes a bend, an angle, and the village grew in its hollow, at the crossroads of old trade routes, between Iași and Chișinău.
On 20 August, the VIIIth edition of the „Pyretus” bulletin was launched at the Museum of History and Ethnography. The name is worth a pause, because it carries a double charge: „Pyretus” was the name given in Antiquity to the Prut river, mentioned as far back as Herodotus, and it is at the same time the title of the history and ethnography bulletin of the Ungheni Museum. In other words, in a single day the town celebrated both the river that gave it its shape and the memory it writes about itself.
Also that day, in the City Hall lobby, an exhibition of photographs and articles from the interwar period was opened, organised by the Museum. Historian Vasile Iucal presented new information about interwar Ungheni. For the first time, an embroidered blouse from the ’30s of the last century was shown — sewn by the mother of the painter Victor Cobzac, a „Master of Art” and a native of Ungheni. The exhibition was to stay open until early September.
The programme, day by day
The peak of the celebration fell in the last five days of the month, when three important dates overlapped.
On 27 August, on Independence Day, the unveiling of an information panel dedicated to „Piața Independenței” (Independence Square) was announced — according to the City Hall, 15 years after this name was given to the town’s central square. On the same day, the new twinning agreement with the municipality of Tulcea in Romania was signed — by mayors Vitalie Vrabie and Ștefan Ilie — and towards the evening the „Hora de la Prut” Festival was scheduled, which, according to the organisers, has reached its VIIth edition — a music and dance festival that unfolds in Piața Independenței and opens, by tradition, with a grand Horă (Horă Mare).
28 August is the patronal feast day — the Dormition of the Mother of God, marked in Ungheni by the old calendar — and was announced as the busiest day: the traditional Parade (Alai) of institutions and enterprises, official moments, the handing out of distinctions and exhibitions. A show was announced for the evening, with the singers Dana Marchitan, Valeria Marcu and Tania Turtureanu, alongside the ethno-rock band „Lupii lui Calancea” (Calancea’s Wolves).
On 30 August, as part of a national tour, the band „Gândul Mâței” — a rock group from Chișinău, nearly three decades after it was founded — presented its anniversary show in Ungheni.
On 31 August, Romanian Language Day, around 80 residents of Ungheni took part in „Dictarea care ne UNește” — the local edition of the Great National Dictation, organised under the aegis of the Presidency by the Ministry of Education and Research, and in Ungheni by the Education Directorate in partnership with the City Hall. It was the second year the event was held in Ungheni (the fourth nationally). Participants were given a fragment from „Testamentul” (The Testament) by Gheorghe Urschi. The jury, led by Vera Burlacu — according to the City Hall, the most experienced Romanian-language teacher in Ungheni, with over 55 years of service — was to review the papers, and the results were to be announced on 10 September. After the dictation, flowers were laid at the busts of two poets who contributed to the development and protection of the Romanian language: Mihai Eminescu and Grigore Vieru. In the evening, the House of the Romanian Language organised a dedicated event in the „Micul Cluj” Park.
Throughout the celebration, the Fair of folk craftsmen and local producers was open.
What the artists say about the town
The artistic programme had a note of local pride. Dana Marchitan, a well-known singer, carries the title „Miss Ungheni 1999” on her record, while Valeria Marcu is from Ungheni itself — audiences across the country came to know her on „Vocea României” (The Voice of Romania) in 2022, when she turned the jury’s chairs. „Lupii lui Calancea”, the project of Alex Calancea, has for nearly a decade blended rock with authentic folklore, and „Gândul Mâței” is one of the veteran bands of Chișinău’s alternative scene.
Ungheni and the diplomacy of cities
Signing a twinning agreement precisely during the Municipality Days is not a novelty but a tradition. Ungheni now has twinning ties with 23 towns and regions on three continents — from Iași and Cluj-Napoca to Kutaisi in Georgia or Winston-Salem in the United States — and several of the agreements were signed exactly during the Municipality Days, at the end of August. All 23 are marked with flags at the Scuarul Înfrățirii (Twinning Square) in Ungheni, a specially designed space with lighting and a multifunctional pavilion.
Tulcea officially joined this list on 27 August. The agreement was signed by the mayors of the two towns — Vitalie Vrabie and Ștefan Ilie — in a festive atmosphere. The relationship began a year earlier, within a project dedicated to urban regeneration and adaptation to climate change. Tulcea, nicknamed „the Gateway to the Danube Delta”, and Ungheni, „the Western Gateway of the Republic of Moldova to Europe”, found common ground from the very start, according to Ungheni City Hall.
Two other anniversaries were marked on 27 August as well. On the one hand, 20 years of friendship and cooperation with Reghin — the first town in Romania Ungheni twinned with, on 16 September 2006. Present in Ungheni, the mayor of Reghin, Mark Endre Dejo, remarked that over the years the relationship had become „much stronger and more beautiful”. On the other hand, it marked 10 years of twinning with the town of Joniškis in Lithuania (agreement signed on 2 July 2016); on this occasion, deputy mayor Ghita Vilciauskienė came to Ungheni.
Also during the Municipality Days, on 27 August, a twinning agreement was signed with the Turkish city of Izmit — Ungheni’s 23rd international partnership, according to the City Hall’s website. The flags of both new partners were raised at the Twinning Square.
This is, in fact, a link different from any possible rapprochement with the Dutch town of Beekdaelen, which has been written about before: that is another thread, one that does not yet figure among Ungheni’s official twinnings.
Who the celebration is for
At the last census, in 2024, the town of Ungheni numbered roughly 26.4 thousand inhabitants, which makes it the country’s third city, after Chișinău and Bălți, and the largest in the Centre development region. For all of them, the twelve August days were both a reason to celebrate and a showcase: the Fair of local producers brought the town’s economy out into the square, and the string of anniversaries — 564 years since the first mention, the patronal feast, the two national days — linked, in a single arc, the distant past of „satul Unghiul” to the town of today.