Things to do
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Copou Park
The oldest public park in the country, laid out in 1833, with the lime tree Mihai Eminescu is said to have written under and an obelisk raised to the reforming laws of the 1830s.
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Golia Monastery
A seventeenth century monastery behind high walls with a 30 metre tower that can be climbed, combining Byzantine plan with Renaissance detail. Ion Creangă lived in a house in its precinct.
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Hotel Traian
A hotel of 1882 on Union Square whose iron frame was designed in the Eiffel workshops, and the oldest hotel still working in the city.
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Iași Botanical Garden
The oldest and largest botanical garden in the country, founded in 1856 and now over one hundred hectares on the Copou hill, with a rose garden of six hundred varieties and ten glasshouses.
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Iași Metropolitan Cathedral
The largest Orthodox church in the country when it was finished in 1887, holding the relics of Saint Parascheva, which draw a pilgrimage each October that fills the city and closes the streets around it.
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Palace of Culture
A neo-gothic palace finished in 1925 on the foundations of the princely court, with 298 rooms and a clock tower whose bells play the Hora Unirii on the hour. It holds four museums, of art, history, ethnography and science, on one ticket.
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Three Hierarchs Monastery
A church of 1639 whose entire exterior is carved in thirty bands of stone lacework, no two alike, originally gilded. It holds the tomb of Dimitrie Cantemir and the restoration of the 1880s is itself now historic.