Save Chisinau is an initiative within I am trying to promote the issue of cultural heritage in online media. I believe that in order to solve a problem we have to be conscious and to understand what is cultural heritage. We must first be aware about it. That’s what I’m trying to do within the project. I had several initiatives mostly - photo projects, digital mapping, exhibitions and research. The most known is the project named "Old Doors of Chisinau" - within I collect all the historical doors from Chisinau and insert them on a map as well. We have a blog page, a Facebook page and an Instagram account ( https://savechisinau.wordpress.com, https://www.facebook.com/savechisinau/.

Several years ago I posted my first picture of an old building from Chisinau, Moldova. I loved that picture. I saw in it a different Chisinau that I didn't see before. I started to walk more in within the historical part of the city in order to discover the old architecture. I started an instagram account and named it Save Chișinău. It had really good feedback. People were writing to me and tell me that they never saw one building or another and that they never saw this side of our capital. I won several prizes with some of that pictures. My „tours” within historical center didn't stop at taking just pictures. I started to do some research. This is how I found one old building with a prison from soviet times. I never found any official information about that but I decided to take some pictures of the building and of the cells within underground and published this story on the blog. This is how I started the blog https://savechisinau.wordpress.com (in 2015). So far, this was one of the most popular article on the blog. The facebook page was published later in order to make the blog page more visible. Afterwards I started to notice different architectural elements, especially doors. I decided to make pictures of all old doors from historical part of my city and to publish them by streets, one by one. The idea was very popular, therefore somebody offered me to create a digital map where I will put all this old doors. I was very happy to share it and to publish it. We still complete it. :) Together with Ministry of Culture we organized two exhibition of "old doors of Chișinău”. I must say we have a lot of ideas now in order to promote our cultural heritage and one of it is to write about cultural heritage and how ca we make it part of our daily lives.

European cities integrated cultural heritage in daily lives. Like Irina Bokova from UNESCO said: ”Tangible and intangible heritage are sources of social cohesion, factors of diversity and drivers of creativity, innovation and urban regeneration – we must do more to harness this power.” In case of my city, Chișinău, we don't have really much left from cultural heritage but we should learn from european countries how to save what's left and how to make it part of our city life. European cities showed us that urban conservation can serve the necessities of local communities but only if we will inntegrate heritage values and their vulnerability status into a wider framework of city development.