A Turkic community, in a stretch of vineyards in southern Moldova, hundreds of kilometres from the nearest Turkish-speaking government, where the churches are Orthodox, the wine is excellent, and the road signs are trilingual.
Welcome to Gagauzia, an autonomous region roughly the size of Luxembourg. Population just over a hundred thousand. A language closely related to Turkish. An Orthodox Christian faith. And a community that has spent the last three decades quietly running its own affairs inside a country that, on the map, looks like it shouldn't have room for it.
This is the sort of contradiction we can't resist. So, here (merely in brief, it does of course deserve more) is the story of the Gagauz.
Who they are, where they came from (nobody entirely agrees!), and how they ended up with their own parliament, their own flag, and a habit of voting the exact opposite way from the rest of Moldova.
A People Historians Can't Pin Down
From Soviet Footnote to Autonomous Republic
Looking In Another Direction
Visiting Gaguazia
A People Historians Can't Pin Down
Start with the basics. The Gagauz speak an Oghuz Turkic language, in the same family as Turkish and Azerbaijani, among others.
They are overwhelmingly Eastern Orthodox Christians, a combination of language and faith that is, to put it mildly, unusual.
Most Turkic-speaking peoples are Muslim; most Orthodox Christians in this part of the world speak Slavic or Romance languages.
The Gagauz are neither, and both.
Where they actually came from is a genuine scholarly mess. There are, apparently, somewhere between 19 and 21 competing theories.
Candidate ideas include descendants of medieval Bulgars, Cuman-Kipchak steppe nomads, Seljuk Turks who followed a wandering dervish called Sarı Saltık into the Balkans, or even Turkified Greeks who kept their Christianity and swapped their language.
Genetic studies have added a twist to the tale too, rather than simply answering a question (as those who first peered at the DNA through a microscope must have hoped). Gagauz populations cluster genetically with their Balkan neighbours (Bulgarians, Macedonians, Romanians) rather than with Anatolian or Central Asian Turkic groups, which points towards theories of language swapping rather than long-distance migration.
In other words, the ancestors probably didn't travel all that far; but the language they adopted did.
Appropriately, well into the twentieth century, many Gagauz didn't call themselves Gagauz at all. They used the term "Hasli Bulgar", or "true Bulgarians” instead, perhaps with a clearer view of themselves than university linguists and science boffins have been able to establish since then.
What's clear is the more recent history.
Gagauz Recent History
Between roughly 1812 and 1846, the Russian Empire resettled Gagauz communities out of Ottoman Bulgaria and into Bessarabia; the region straddling modern Moldova and Ukraine.
In order to repopulate land vacated by Nogai Tatar tribes. They were compelled to leave by Russian authorities, settling near the Sea of Azov.
The Gaguaz have farmed that stretch of steppe ever since, and it remains an overwhelmingly agrarian society, with viniculture (just as in the rest of Moldova) being the big thing to get involved in.
A dozen wineries in the region process something like 400,000 tonnes of grapes a year, and the local wine culture is old enough and distinctive enough that it's become the main thing that draws outside visitors at all.
From Soviet Footnote to Autonomous Republic
For most of the twentieth century, Gagauzia was just another rural corner of the USSR.
That changed fast as the Soviet Union began to come apart.
Nationalist movements were rising across Moldova in the late 1980s, largely oriented toward closer ties with Romania, which understandably alarmed a Russian-speaking, Orthodox Turkic minority who didn't see their place in that project at all.
In 1990, mirroring Transnistria's move the same year, Gagauz leaders declared their own ‘Gagauz Republic’, independent of Chișinău.
Unlike Transnistria, this one didn't turn into a shooting war, probably due to the lack of military backing by a now-foreign power which the PMR enjoyed but which Gaguazia lacked.
After several tense years of negotiation, Moldova and the Gagauz reached a settlement, and on 14 January 1995 the ‘Law on the Special Legal Status of Gagauzia’ came into force, creating the Autonomous Territorial Unit of Gagauzia within Moldova, its own People's Assembly (Halk Topluşu), its own elected governor (the Başkan, who by law has to actually speak Gagauz), its own police, and three official languages - Romanian, Gagauz, and Russian.
The capital, Comrat, is a pleasant and unspectacular town that still feels more like a large village than a seat of government.
Looking In Another Direction
Here's where Gagauzia takes a similar approach to Transnistria, even though the two solved their post-Soviet crises so differently.
Both, given the choice, point their political compass toward Moscow rather than Brussels, and keep proving it at the ballot box.
In a 2014 referendum, Gagauzia voted overwhelmingly for closer integration with the Russian-led Customs Union over the EU (a vote Chișinău considered illegal and thus ignored).
Ten years later, when Moldova held a nationwide referendum in 2024 on enshrining EU accession in the constitution, Gagauzia recorded the highest ‘no’ vote of any region in the country, with over 94% against, in a referendum the rest of Moldova narrowly passed.
That standing tension boiled over more directly in 2025, when Gagauzia's sitting governor, Evghenia Gutul, was convicted and jailed by a Moldovan court for illegally funnelling money from a Russia-linked political network into local politics.
It is a case Chișinău treats as proof of Kremlin interference in the region, and one Moscow has denounced as political persecution.
The fallout left Gagauzia's local government in disarray, with disputed elections and open disagreement over who is even entitled to lead the region next, in a developing situation.
None of this makes Gagauzia dangerous or off-limits to visit. It remains open, welcoming, and a very peaceful part of Moldova outside of the political arguments, but it does mean that this small region keeps finding itself, entirely against its rural, unhurried character, at the sharp edge of the argument over which way Moldova as a whole is heading.
Visiting Gaguazia
Unlike Transnistria, Gagauzia involves no border, no checkpoint, and no migration slip. It's simply a couple of hours' drive south from Chișinău.
Head through scenic, vine-covered country, and you're in Comrat without anyone stamping anything.
The town itself is small enough to walk around easily and highlights include the regional history museum (to dig deeper into those nineteen+ origin stories), the orthodox cathedral in a pretty square, various statues and monuments (I heart Comrat, Lenin, Afghanistan War Memorial, and so on), and government buildings flying the Gagauz flag (pale blue, red, and white, with three stars) alongside Moldova's.
One compelling reason to visit though, is the wine.
Local producers around Comrat and Vulcănești run tastings and tours built around the same grapes, and often the same rustic hospitality, that first drew the Gagauz to this stretch of steppe two centuries ago.
A visit usually comes with kurban, the ceremonial bulgur-and-mutton dish that shows up at Gagauz weddings and feast days.
Come for the strangeness of the combination.
A Turkic-speaking, Orthodox, autonomous, wine-producing republic tucked inside a country most people couldn't place on a map, and get the bonus of finding out that it also makes some of the best, and least-known, wine in Europe.
Koryo Tours
Group Tours to Moldova & Transnistria
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Simon Cockerell
Simon has been Koryo’s General Manager since 2002. He has travelled to North Korea more than 175 times and has probably been to the country more than any other Westerner. He is a respected speaker on the country and appears regularly in international media. He is also a tour specialist in Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and the Russian Far East where he has personally designed and led multiple tours over the years.