Saturday, at the Municipal Stadium in Ungheni: a national open crossfit tournament, with the start announced by the organisers for 9:00, in two stages of strength, speed and endurance. It bears the name of Anatol Popovici — the judge born in Boghenii Vechi who died at Bender on 20 June 1992, at 30. Who the man in the tournament's title was.
In the commune of Valea Mare, Ungheni district, local craftsmen are carving a public troiță — a wayside memorial cross — out of oak beams, dedicated to the villagers who fell in the two world wars and to those deported in 1941 and 1949. The monument began with an October 2024 decision of the communal council and is paid for from the local budget. The work is still in progress, but several answers are missing: how much it costs, when it will be finished and the final form of the dedication — the town hall has not made them public.
In the summer of 1949, the Soviet regime seized an entire family from the village of Măcărești and sent it more than 5,000 kilometres away, to the Irkutsk region. One of the deported children, Teodor Șișcanu, survives in an archival photograph published in The Book of Memory (Cartea Memoriei) — the official catalogue of the victims of totalitarianism. In the Ungheni district, the catalogue gathers around 2,900 names, and for those seized in 1949 the collective “address” had a single name — Irkutsk.
On Monday, 6 July, marking 77 years since the largest wave of deportations, dozens of Ungheni residents gathered at the Martyrs' Cross of the Nation, white flowers in hand. A memorial service, a moment of silence and a monologue about a night that has not ended yet. District council head Dionisie Ternovschi called keeping the memory alive a moral duty of every generation.
Thirty-four years after the June 1992 battles, the national commemoration of those who fell in the War of the Dniester can be read on the map of the Ungheni district too. At the monument, the town remembers four names, but the official state list — the “Book of Memory” — shows at least nine men born in the district who died that year, many of them at Tighina, in the very June days now being commemorated. Triunghi.md recovered their names, villages and where they fell.
The Government has allocated over 1.8 million lei to compensate six people whose assets the communist regime confiscated. The sum is small, but it opens a door to a vast and unfinished reckoning: in the Ungheni district alone, the official catalogue of the victims of totalitarianism gathers thousands of names, from more than 60 localities. The law gives victims and heirs the right to compensation — but how many actually claim it?
