- After cruising through the Gagauzian village of Congaz, we decide to head further south. Gagauzia consists of a patchwork of enclaves and exclaves, and will make for an interesting day of exploration. The main road south is straightforward, and we pass several huge Soviet-style markers for a new village or district. Most have larger than life statues and are pieces of art. We end up stopping at all of them. In between, we see huge sunflower fields. On my phone, I can see the seemingly haphazard borders between Moldova and Gagauzia. We try to notice differences, in housing styles, in crops grown, in script, or anything else, but whenever we think to see something we think might be Gagauzian, we also see it in the next village which is Moldovan. Once again, we ponder about the meaning of borders in general.
- A few kilometres after Chirilovca, we take a right turn onto an unpaved road. We drive through a few more small villages, and stop frequently. We see several small memorials for the Second World War, we see small cemeteries, we see traditional wooden houses with carved decorations, some painted, some not. Outside the villages, we see fields with crops and sunflowers growing on the rolling hills. Landscapes don't come much more bucolic than the ones here in southern Moldova. When we finally reach the turnoff for Carbalia, we stop to take a picture of the old Carbalia street sign, in Cyrillic. An old Gagauz man shows up from Carbalia, and we wait for him to come closer, which takes a long time. When he is near, he dismounts, and asks us to take pictures of him, his horse, and his cart. Only later would I find out that he got a little too eager to grab my travel buddy when she gets off the horse.
- We say goodbye, and drive to our destination of the day. We see another sign which gives the name in Roman and Gagauz language (Kırbaalı). We pass the main square, and take one of the small roads running through Carbalia. We drive higher up, where the road deteriorates. We stop several times to enjoy the views of the surrounding landscape and to see an abandoned bus. We continue cautiously, until the road gets better. To our surprise, we only see very few people around in this small village that only has a little over 500 inhabitants. While it looks much like the other villages we saw, Carbalia is special in that it is both an enclave as well as an exclave. We head back to the secondary road, head back to the main road, make more stops, one to buy delicious fruits. We pay a visit to the National Gagauz History and Ethnographic Museum at Beșalma and then, it is time to leave Gagauzia behind us.
