Tourist attractions

Iași has the densest concentration of medieval religious architecture of any large Romanian city, for a concrete reason: it was the capital of Moldavia for almost three centuries, from 1564 to 1859, and every ruler who wanted to leave something behind founded it here.

What is in the list

The selection covers four registers that overlap geographically:

• Medieval heritage in the centre — Trei Ierarhi, its façade covered entirely in carved stone, St Nicholas the Princely, founded by Stephen the Great, and the Metropolitan Cathedral, which holds the relics of Saint Parascheva.
• Fortified hilltop monasteries — Cetățuia, Galata, Frumoasa, Golia. They had curtain walls and towers: the capital was a target.
• Museums — the Palace of Culture alone houses four museums, across 298 rooms and some 36,000 square metres.
• Memorial houses — Creangă's Bojdeuca, Romania's first memorial house (1918), the Vasile Pogor Museum, where Junimea met, and Dosoftei's House.

How the list is ordered

By real popularity — Google review count — not by our preferences. The filters above let you sort by rating or alphabetically and narrow by neighbourhood.

We include only places rated above 4.0 with at least 60 reviews. The threshold is lower than on the Bucharest portal, where it is 100, because Iași is roughly seven times smaller — at 100 reviews only the obvious landmarks would survive.

Before you set out

Museum hours change seasonally, and some close on Mondays. The hilltop monasteries involve a real climb — see the dedicated route. For the full historical context, churches and monasteries and the architecture of Iași.