Or, in short, NIM! This is the abbreviation of the name of the largest native music festival in the neighboring country. NIM is, at the same time, the identity statement of an entire generation. For Moldovans, identity and music are the same thing, and this says more about them than any political or sociological analysis. The two days spent in Chisinau gave me many lessons and many proofs that it can be done. That folklore can be an international brand, that patriotism can be at the same time real, decent and cool, that a generation can be coagulated around something completely different than drugs, sex and violence.
Ladies and gentlemen, I invite you too to listen to the music and understand why the Born in Moldova festival is the cultural revolution that Romania missed and constantly avoids.
Let the music play!
“Doina te quiero, hora te quiero
The Moldovan variant of the Romanian language
Focul din vatră, Doga, Vieru”
He is Vlad Sabajuc, known on stage as Satoshi, he is 27 years old and is from Cahul. On the stage of the Dinamo Stadium in Chisinau, he thrilled thousands of people. He’s a rapper who quotes doina and hora in the chorus, who invokes in his songs Eugeniu Doga and Grigore Vieru. He says that the hearth fire is a landmark, not just a simple metaphor and who, in the same song, sings:
Patria-mamă, te amo
Forever ne cheamă
La lucru, la zeamă, noi trecem vama
Familia e baza
These are the verses that represent the essence of a young generation that we understand too little. A generation that chose to love its country, even though its parents found it too small and too feeble, even though many election rounds were stolen and influenced by the stronger ones, even though Russia pushed from all sides, even though half of the population left to work in the West. A generation that does not make patriotism an excuse or an electoral slogan, but a state of mind assumed daily, on stage and off it.
A flag like a protective cloak
One of the most powerful images I’ve seen in Chisinau is that of young people making a cloak out of the Moldovan flag. Wrapping yourself in the flag of one of the poorest countries in Europe, a country that has driven your parents to work abroad, doesn’t just mean that you don’t hate it for what it is, but probably that you love it for what it will become through your own effort. It means that you’ve chosen a project instead of an excuse.
How easy it would have been otherwise, and how many opportunities Moldova would give you to do so. To be disgusted by it, to curse it, to abandon it without looking back, to use it as an explanation for all your failures. There are countries that offer you more reasons to love them and yet they are loved less. Moldova offers you poverty, corruption, the border war, half of the family gone, a Soviet past that has not entirely ended and a future that has not entirely begun and yet, its youth choose to sing about it. Not out of ignorance, not out of naivety, not out of a lack of alternatives. Out of a lucidity that we, the Romanians, have long lost or perhaps, never had: that a country is not what you find when you are born in it, but everything you build while you live in it.
June 13 in two lives
On June 13, 1990, I was fleeing from miners through Bucharest. I was a student, thus a sure target. “Heads” have always been enemy number one of authoritarian regimes and the favorite amusement of those who believe that thinking is not just boring, but also dangerous. The communists called them “heads”, their torturers, “brains”. I was protecting my head and knew nothing about Moldova. I didn’t know that the fear of then and the hope of now are the same thing, thirty-six years apart and a stone’s throw from Prut.
On June 13th and 14th, 2026, the second edition of the Born in Moldova festival took place. A good opportunity to understand that, unlike Romanian festivals, there are small nations that behave like minorities even in their own home and who defend their cultural treasure with all their being. Not because they are weak. But because they know something that the great nations seem to have forgotten: only those who feel that their identity is in danger truly know how to defend it.
On the NIM stage, Irina Rimes, Satoshi, Tania Turtureanu, Lupii lui Calancea, Alternosfera, Carla’s Dreams, Zdob și Zdub, Magnat & Feoctist, Pavel and Cleopatra Stratan, Misha Miller and others have performed, to whom I apologize for not mentioning.
What do they all have in common? One thing, folklore
Valued as an adornment, not as an ornament applied to a Western product to appear exotic on Spotify, but as raw material, as a backbone, as a starting point towards their unique art. Zdob și Zdub have combined Bessarabian folklore with hard rock and have taken Moldova to Eurovision three times, performing on the same stages as Red Hot Chili Peppers and Linkin Park.
Magnat & Feoctist sing about Iura from Telenesti, about the village girl who wants to get married, about the community where private life becomes a collective event and they do it with healthy humor, with the intelligence of detail and with the honesty that you can’t find in any other Romanian mainstream artist. Irina Rimes, originally from the village of Izvoare, built her album “Origini” starting from the songs her grandmother used to hum to her. “We are born with an exceptional cultural heritage,” she says, as if revealing a big secret.
Satoshi took the traditional formula of the folk song – Green Leaf, Wide Leaf – and transformed it into a rap hook about love and the joy of loving! And then there are Calancea’s Wolves, Carla’s Dream, the Osoianu sisters, all unique, incomparable.
And Alternosfera. Founded in 1998 by two high school students from Chisinau, the band started singing in Russian, the most natural thing for a teenager from the post-Soviet capital of Moldova. What happened “afterwards” is, in itself, a story about identity: “With maturation, the value system has been shaped, we solved the puzzle of identity, linguistic affiliation and the cultural code with which you address the public,” says Marcel Bostan, the band’s lead singer.
Their lyrics are, says someone who first listened to them in a car on the way to Sibiu, “like listening to poetry at maximum volume”. Twenty-seven years of alternative rock, five albums, hundreds of concerts in Romania, the Netherlands, the UK. A band that treats music, in the words of the same Marcel Bostan, “responsibly”, a word that no longer exists in the vocabulary of the Romanian music scene.
Blues, rock’n’roll from folklore, hip-hop, pop, all derived from a common root, the village hearth. Young lads and braided girls, not prostitutes, not vagabonds, not show-offs! The mother who raised you, the grandmother with worn-out hands, the doina and the hora, the plain and the vine and the fire from the hearth, these are the symbolic materials from which Moldovans have built their music.
At the first edition, in June 2025, at Zimbru Stadium, there were 28 artists and 24,000 people, two national records: the largest stage ever built in Moldova for a music event and the largest lineup of local artists present at a single festival.
Everything started from a concert in April 2024, with 5,500 spectators at the Chișinău Arena. Two years later, NIM is at the Dinamo Stadium and the third edition is already announced for 2027, under the slogan NE reuNIM. Without governmental funds, without any sophisticated state policy.
It is only the will of an active, participatory public, living through something other than screams, dancing all the Serbian and Romanian round dances and whirls as they saw their parents do. Looking at everyone, young, old, children, parents, and grandparents, you realize that this nation, despite all the hardships, has decided that it is worth loving itself much more than hating itself for all the failures!
On stage, Satoshi does not present himself to the audience, he chooses to speak to an entire generation. “Do not forget, wherever you go, you are Moldovans. And this requires you to represent your country with dignity. Being Moldovan means working better and more than others, because we are a small nation!” There are thousands of people in front of him and he chooses to remind them of a moral code.
On Dinamo Stadium, I saw school children singing the same verses as people over sixty years old. The same melody, the same text, the same hand raised in the air. Young people whose parents work in the West, who know Romanian, who speak English, French, and Russian, who listen to Linkin Park and J. Cole, and who choose to sing in their language. Not out of ignorance, they simply chose so. Because theirs are good. Because theirs are international. Because theirs are role models, not samples.
Next to us, at the concert, was also the Minister of Education from the Republic of Moldova, who thoroughly enjoyed the music and danced to every possible rhythm. “Moldova is not a place, it’s a people” — sang Satoshi together with Dara and Magnat & Feoctist, on August 27, 2024, on Independence Day. And no one is being ironic, even though they would have many reasons to be. This is the coagulation of generations around a common dream. A small and talented people, who choose to make a big country.
What we, Romanians, do not say, do not think, do not do
And now let’s talk about us! With honesty and by comparison!
Romania has festivals with hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps even millions! Untold, Electric Castle, Neversea, Beach Please, impeccable productions, international artists, top-tier logistics. It’s good and, at the same time, it’s exactly the main problem, no major Romanian festival coagulates generations around the Romanian identity, because the Romanian identity does not exist on their stages. It dissipates in marketing, in business, in the worldly and social media. It’s not bad, it’s just insufficient, it’s too little.
Romanian folklore, one of the richest musical heritages in Europe, has no place there, nor an artist to reinvent it with the intelligence that Moldovans do.
What does Romania have instead? It has Gheboasa at Untold with “Give it to the gypsy” — lyrics that incite racial hatred and violence against women. There was also Satra B.E.N.Z., fined at Neversea for lyrics explicitly referring to sexual organs in front of minors. We also have all sorts of parties where rappers requested by students sing, with minors in the room, “lift your panties from the bottom”. To complete the disaster, a court, admittedly foolish, but still a court, decided that artists with obscene lyrics cannot be fined at festivals, because the spectators chose to participate.
Mainstream Romanian music has become vulgarized and cheapened to the point where you can no longer distinguish between a musical production and an insult to minimal decency, good manners, and the Romanian language. The lyrics are no longer lyrics, they are protrusions, mumblings, sexual onomatopoeia arranged over a beat bought for ten dollars on the internet. The language of Eminescu, Creangă, Caragiale, the language that survived empires, no longer survives the onslaught of directionless and minimally educated Romanians. It, the Romanian language, is violated every evening on the stages and televisions of Romania, in front of children who don’t know that there is something else.
It’s as if we were all born in tents and camps, not on the porch, next to the hearth and the barn. It’s as if we never had doina, never had hora, never had a musical treasure that made the rounds of Europe. The proud girls and braids have disappeared. What remains has lyrics that you can’t sing in public, let alone in front of your children, and you don’t even feel like singing them, because they no longer say anything about you, your family, or the place you come from.
For Moldovans, it’s about love, about parents and about the good old days. For us, it’s about growths and extremities, about sizes and holes. All deep! And narrow, as if our entire life were an endless coitus, a constant insertion and removal repeated to idiocy. This is what our artists delight us with and, even worse, this is what we also find amusing. Without holes, we would be dead, without extremities, we would be just carcasses. Civilization abandoned us long ago and it’s understandable, it has its own pride.
Ignorant, but arrogant
And the problem is not that Romania lacks valuable artists, because it has them. Many are at least on par with those from Moldova. The issue, however, is that Romanian artists do not build anything around them, no identity, no movement, no project that surpasses their own streaming account and their own stage image.
There is Loredana, who has exploited folklore with an intelligence and an explosion that few Romanian artists have ever reached. There is also Bogdan Mihail Simion, who sings to the heart with the mind and who transforms the past into modernity. Even Tudor Gheorghe did not manage to create something beyond the stage. They did not create a school, they did not form a generation, they did not build a phenomenon. The distance between an exceptional artist and a cultural movement is exactly the distance between a genius man and a people who have chosen a common project. Moldova has covered this distance. Romania has not even started it.
I would like to distinctly mention here Teodora Brody-Enache, born in Onesti, settled in Switzerland, the only Romanian artist who has built an international career on the fusion of jazz and doina. She performed with Johnny Răducanu, took the stage at Carnegie Hall, and lent her voice to George Enescu’s Rhapsody I with a chamber orchestra. She understood that the Romanian doina should not remain in museums and turned it into raw, living material. But she too remained alone, an isolated phenomenon, admired and ignored at the same time, without musical successors, without a school, without a generation to carry forward what she built.
What we lack is not talent. It’s the sense of responsibility towards the public. No mainstream Romanian artist has ever stepped on stage and told the audience something about who they are, where they come from, and what they owe to those who raised them. No Romanian artist has turned the concert into a civic act, has chosen to be a role model instead of just being a spectacle, show, and glitter!
For Moldovans, the stage is a place from which you speak to a nation. For us, the stage is a place from which you sell yourself to an audience. The difference between these two attitudes is exactly the difference between NIM and any Romanian festival you know. But the failure is not just of the artists. It is also of the young people who listen to them and who do not have the curiosity to find out where they come from, what they have inherited, what has been taken from them or what they have discarded.
And deeper still, there is also the failure of their parents, that is, of us. Of the generation that made the Revolution of December 1989, who went out under bullets demanding freedom and dignity and who, in the years that followed, did not pass on either the values, the treasure, nor the feeling that there is something to defend.
Moldova has lost more, suffered more, was more threatened, and yet found the strength to build a music scene about love, about grandparents, about homeland, about dignity. Romania won its freedom in 1989 and spent it on the lost cultural virginity for nothing.
We have become accustomed to believe, somewhat conveniently, that our Moldovan brothers are more needy, weaker, and that, by contrast, we are bigger, richer, more evolved. We amuse ourselves at their expense with a broad and generous smile, the smile of someone who “has made it”. History contradicts us, as does NIM! And Satoshi contradicts us! Even the old man with the straw hat who knows by heart the lyrics of a rap song contradicts us!
Despite all the hardships they face, they have built something we do not have: a common thread, a project that unites them, respect for parents and grandparents, for their language and for all they have inherited. They still have the strength to sing about love and faith, about the village they left and the mother who waited for them.
This is not regression, I believe this is humility. This is reconciliation with yourself and with your people, a luxury that we have lost in the pursuit of “civilization”. We are supposedly civilized! I believe they are also civilized, but also rooted. The question that should keep us awake at night, I believe, is who, in fact, should learn from whom?
For me, a Romanian born in Bucharest, “Born in Moldova” is not just the title of a festival. It is a certificate of belonging to a nation that we amused ourselves by looking down upon until the smile froze on our faces and turned into a grimace.
Ours, of course!
SERGIU TOADER
