Bessarabia – former part of Moldavian Principality, was taken by the Russian Empire first time in 1812, and a strong influence came from Russian Orthodox Church. The Church was used by the Russians to russificate the local population, as Romanian language was forbidden to be used for religious services. As a result, even today we have 2 Metropolis in Republic of Moldova, one under the Russian, and another under the Romanian Patriarchy. We will visit many monasteries, most of them not so known, but each of them having something interesting to show, cave churches/monasteries, original Russian orthodox monasteries, Romanian monasteries changed into Russian ones, old believers monastery etc. And the most important we will have local contact, with people, monks and nuns, free and open discussions with high hierarchy people from both churches. It will be an interesting trip, may be not so impressive from art and history point of view , but for sure extremely impressive from the experience we will have interacting with local people and people from these monasteries