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 stretches over nearly two weeks — from 20 to 31 August. Beyond the shows and the fair, it is 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 8th 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 celebrates 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 1930s was shown — sewn by the mother of the painter Victor Cobzac, a „Master of Art” and a native of Ungheni. The exhibition remains open until early September.
The programme, day by day
The peak of the celebration falls in the last five days of the month, when three important dates overlap.
On 27 August, on Independence Day, the unveiling of an information panel dedicated to „Piața Independenței” (Independence Square) is announced — according to the City Hall, 15 years after this name was given to the town’s central square. At the same time, a new twinning agreement is to be signed, with the municipality of Tulcea in Romania, and towards the evening the „Hora de la Prut” Festival is 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 the busiest day: the traditional Parade (Alai) of institutions and enterprises, official moments, the handing out of distinctions and exhibitions. The evening closes with a show featuring 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 — presents its anniversary show in Ungheni. And on 31 August, on Romanian Language Day, the town hosts, for the second year according to the City Hall, „Dictarea care ne UNește” (the dictation that UNites us) — a local initiative, distinct from the „Marea Dictare Națională” (Great National Dictation) organised by the ministry in Chișinău. Throughout the celebration, the Fair of folk craftsmen and local producers is open.
What the artists say about the town
The artistic programme has 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 already has twinning ties with 21 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.
Tulcea is added to this list. The Local Council of the Danube municipality decided on the twinning back in spring, and the two administrations are already cooperating in a European green-infrastructure project in the Black Sea basin. 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 are both a reason to celebrate and a showcase: the Fair of local producers brings 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 — links, in a single arc, the distant past of „satul Unghiul” to the town of today.