Saharna holds the only relics of a canonised saint in Moldova, and the monastery that keeps them was founded because of a footprint in the rock. In 1776 a monk named Vartolomeu Ciungu said the Virgin had appeared to him on a cliff called Grimidon, and a mark in the stone there has been venerated as her footprint ever since. He founded the Holy Trinity monastery on the ground below that cliff. The saint himself is recent. Macarie Tincu, the monastery's spiritual father, died in 1969 in a hut at the edge of the village; when his grave was opened in 1995 his body was found undecayed, and that December he became the first person the Moldovan Orthodox Church canonised after the Soviet era. Around the blue domes spreads the reserve — 674 hectares of oak and hornbeam on white limestone cliffs above the Dniester, cut by the Saharna, a stream just 16 kilometres long that spends its last few kilometres falling: 22 cascades down a wooded gorge.
From the monastery a path follows the stream up the gorge, past one cascade after another, to the fall everyone comes for: Groapa Tiganului, the Gypsy's Pit, where the water drops about four and a half metres into a rock hollow some ten metres deep. Steps climb the other way, up to the little chapel on Grimidon that shelters the footprint and the widest view in the valley — domes below, orchards, and the Dniester swinging out of the trees. Higher again, on the bare plateau of Dealul Manastirii, lie the earthworks of an Iron Age hillfort; little is left up there but a marker and a lot of sky. The recent past is harder to read from the calm of the courtyard: the state closed the monastery in 1964 and ran a psychiatric hospital in it, and monks did not return until 19 April 1991. Today about twenty of them live here, and on 26 May, Macarie's feast, the gorge fills with pilgrims.