Saharna Landscape Reserve is a limestone gorge in the Rezina district of eastern Moldova, above the Dniester river, where the Saharna stream steps down twenty-two waterfalls to a monastery at the bottom that holds the relics of the country's only saint, and it is walked from the monastery up the gorge to the biggest fall and climbed above to a chapel over a footprint in the rock. The monastery is here because of a vision: a monk saw the Virgin on the cliff and found her footprint in the stone where she had stood, and the Holy Trinity monastery was founded below it in 1776, with a flight of steps running up the cliff to a tiny chapel built over the hollow that pilgrims believe is the footprint; inside the church a hand-carved iconostasis climbs in gold tiers under painted vaults, and the relics of Macarie, a monk of the monastery canonised in 1995, lie in a shrine that draws the pilgrims. The Soviets closed the monastery in 1964 and made its cells hospital wards, its summer church a storehouse and its winter church a house of culture, while a priest kept working at night, and the monks came back in 1991.
The gorge behind the monastery is a walk of an hour along the stream through downy oak and hornbeam, the water stepping down limestone shelves in a chain of small cascades to the biggest, Groapa Tiganului, the Gypsy's Pit, a modest fall of about four and a half metres dropping over a limestone lip into a rock hollow ten metres deep. A steep pull above the monastery ends on an open plateau where a fortress stood three thousand years ago, with the Dniester below and Transnistria on the far bank, and the caves in the cliffs held hermits before the monastery. The thaw flood of March drives all 22 cascades hard, and in October the oak turns yellow and rust over the shelves buried in leaves. Saharna is a gorge with a saint at its foot, and the footprint on the cliff is why the monks came.