In the courtyard of the "Muzeul Național de Etnografie și Istorie Naturală" (National Museum of Ethnography and Natural History) in Chişinău is a small wooden windmill.
Tall people will be able to see it without entering the museum, but the entrance
fee is only 10 Moldovan Lei (about € 0.52) plus a small optional fee if one
wants to take photos. The website of the museum provides some information about it:
"The story of a windmill
In the middle of the 19th century, according to some estimates, there were over 2000 windmills in Bessarabia. Today, we can count on our fingers the localities where windmills have been preserved, all of them abandoned, - at Cernoleuca, Mileștii Mici, Beșalma... One of the last examples is preserved in the courtyard of the National Museum of Ethnography and Natural History. The mill was brought from the village of Gangura, Ialoveni district, being built by Lazăr Rozovan (the father) and Tudor Rozovan (the son). In typological aspect, it is a mill with a pivot (the body can be rotated according to the direction of the wind) and four wings. It is covered with shingles and has ornate rafters. The mill is individualized by its unusually small dimensions. It was built on the basis of a manual mill, during the famine of 1946-1947. At that time, the mill had saved the life of the Rozovan family, who, by grinding the grain of other villagers, he thus obtained an additional source of income. This valuable monument of popular technique is, at the same time, the witness of some tragic pages in the history of this land. Perhaps not by chance, in Romanian folklore, the grinding of grain in the mill symbolizes the hardships of fate: 'People take turns, like grain at the millstone, among the millstones of the times and the trials of life. To pass through the mill is to endure the rigours of fate, to overcome each existential stage to the end' (Silvia Ciubotaru)."
Translated from source:
www.muzeu.md/povestea-unei-mori-de-vant/