In summer 2010 there were carried out the first archaeological saving excavations in the old, historical part of Chișinău. Oral tradition and written sources indicate that the historical heart of Chișinău was located in the lower part of the modern city, by the river of Bâc. Apparently, the locality emerged by a spring had already existed in the second half of the 14th century, before the ousting of the Golden Horde from the south-eastern part of the Carpathian-Dniester area in 1370s - 1380s. On the opposite, left bank of the river a Tartar settlement was located.

On the right bank of the Bâc River, on the top of a hill with a spring at the foot, there is the Intercession of the Virgin (“Măzărache”) Church that was built, by different opinions, in 1739-1740 (Eșanu 1998, 56), 1742 (Ciocanu 2002, 39-43), or, according to other information, in 1752 (Chișinău 1984, 324). It was erected on the site of another, more ancient wooden church that had been burnt by the Turkish army in 1739 during the Russian-Turkish war of 1735-1739 (Eșanu 2001, 147).

In the course of the archaeological excavations there have been revealed some ceramic materials of the Late Bronze and the Early Iron Ages as well as numerous evidences of the medieval time. A ditch dated, apparently, from the 16th-17th centuries that closed the access to the promontory and remnants of a ground dwelling with a stone basement of the 17th-18th centuries are of the greatest interest. Here we found well preserved remains of a monumental architectural structure of red brick defined as an aqueduct constructed by A. Bernardazzi in the end of the 19th century (Bubis 1997, 59-62).

The excavations were conducted in the south-western periphery of the cemetery and directly at the northern apse of the church. In the area of about 100 m2 there were investigated 52 burials. The vast majority of them were of the Christian rite. Inventory of the burials is rather poor. In different burials there were found from one to five coins; bone, bronze or silver buttons; earrings; pottery fragments; rings; etc. During the investigation of the cemetery of the Măzărache Church in the historical part of Chisinau there were found 29 coins. 13 ones belong to the Hungarian issues of the 16th - early 17th centuries, one silver coin is a “poltorak” of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth of the early 17th century and the other is Swedish shilling of the second half of the same century. The third undefined poorly-preserved European coin presumably belongs to these issues. Turkish coins (13 pieces) are in the majority of the 18th -nearly 19th century. Only three of them belong to the 16th-17th centuries.

As a result of the investigations in the cemetery it also can be stated that already in the second half of the 16th century the space of the promontory around the supposed wooden church was entirely occupied by burials of the local Christian community. The last burials were carried out in the first two decades of the 19th century, when a stone fence was built around the church.

List of figures:
Fig. 1. Coins found during the investigations of the Măzărache Church cemetery in Chișinău.