Chisinau's central railway station — Gara Chisinau — was built in 1964, replacing an earlier station destroyed in the war. Its interior and exterior feature substantial Soviet mosaic work, executed in the architectural decoration program that accompanied major public infrastructure projects across the USSR. Railway stations were particularly important sites for monumental art: they were points of arrival and departure, transit hubs through which millions of citizens passed, and therefore ideal locations for the state to communicate its values and ambitions.
The mosaics at Chisinau station depict scenes of Moldovan life, Soviet achievement, and the imagery of movement and connection that was natural to the context of rail travel. In the decades since independence, the station has changed considerably, but the original mosaic work remains — a survival that owes something to the durability of ceramic and smalt tile, and something to the institutional inertia that preserves infrastructure even when its decorative program falls out of favour.