Orheiul Vechi is a monastery cut straight into a limestone cliff above a loop of the Răut river in the Orhei district of Moldova, an hour from Chişinău, with the grassed-over ruins of a Golden Horde capital on the plateau behind it and a village of guesthouses under the cliffs, the most visited place in a country that few visit. The river bends back on itself almost in a circle around a promontory of rock, and from the grassy spine where a small white church stands the whole loop opens below, cliffs on one side, orchards and vineyards on the other; the cliffs are Sarmatian limestone laid down in a shallow sea roughly twelve million years ago, soft enough that monks cut cells into it with hand tools from the thirteenth century, and a low doorway leads into a passage bored through the rock, cool and dim, with the cells opening off it one after another and a bell tower standing out on the cliff face over the drop. The cave church is not a ruin: monks occupy the cells, so shoulders stay covered, women put on a headscarf and voices stay low.
On the flat ground below the promontory lie the stone outlines of Şehr al-Cedid, the New City, planted here as a seat of the Golden Horde in the 1330s and abandoned within two generations: the caravanserai where the merchants stabled their animals, the mosque beside it and the baths the Horde heated from underneath, all traced in the grass. The village under the cliffs, Butuceni, runs on guesthouses rather than restaurants, and lunch is plăcinte pastries, sheep's cheese, mămăligă and house wine carried out to a long table in someone's yard. The thin soil of the plateau carries a rare dry-steppe flora, yellow pheasant's eye and dwarf iris flowering across the bare rock in April, before the summer burns the grass brown. Orheiul Vechi is a cliff with monks inside it, and an empire's city lies in the field behind.