For fifteen of its sixteen kilometres the Saharna does nothing remarkable. Then, in the Rezina district of eastern Moldova, it falls twenty-two times between white limestone walls on its way down to the Dniester. A path takes you up beside it from cascade to cascade, through downy oak and hornbeam. The largest fall is modest by any measure: Groapa Tiganului, the Gypsy's Pit, drops about four and a half metres over a lip into a rock hollow ten metres deep, and you can edge onto the wet shelf behind the curtain. Scale is not the argument here. In March the thaw turns all twenty-two on at once; by October fallen leaves have buried the limestone shelves. Above the gorge a steep pull ends on an open plateau where a hillfort stood three thousand years ago. Almost nothing survives but a marker, and what you climb for is the Dniester unrolling below between wooded slopes.
The monastery at the foot of the gorge is here because of a vision. Vartolomeu Ciungu is said to have prayed for forty days before the Virgin appeared to him on the Grimidon cliff, showed him where to build, and left the sole of her foot pressed into the rock. Steps run up to a small chapel raised over that hollow, and the ledge outside it holds domes, gorge and river in one view. Inside the Holy Trinity church a hand-carved iconostasis climbs in gold tiers under painted vaults. What the pilgrims come for is the reliquary below it: the only relics of a canonised saint in Moldova. The Soviets closed the monastery in 1964 and turned its cells into hospital wards and its churches into a storehouse and a house of culture. Macarie, the monastery's spiritual father, stayed in the valley anyway. Turned out, he built a hut at the edge of the village and went on baptising children and marrying couples there at night, in secret, until he died in 1969. Monks came back in 1991, opened his grave four years later and had him canonised: the relics in that reliquary are his.