Mileștii Mici is a commune in Ialoveni District,

Moldova Moldova, officially the Republic of Moldova, is a Landlocked country, landlocked country in Eastern Europe, with an area of and population of 2.42 million. Moldova is bordered by Romania to the west and Ukraine to the north, east, and south. ...

, composed of two villages, Mileștii Mici and Piatra Albă. It has a population of over 4,500 and is from Chişinău. For much of its history, the locals have extracted white stone from underneath the village. Several hundred kilometers of the underground extraction site exist today. Some of the shafts are used as cellars for storing Mileştii Mici wines.

History

Mileștii Mici is an ancient Moldovan village, having been mentioned in ancient books and chronicles. Archeological research has found settlement remains from many different epochs and cultures, beginning in the tenth to eleventh millennium BC. In 1970, Emmanuel Brihuneț, the priest of "Saint Nikolai" church in Mileștii Mici, discovered some references about the village in old manuscripts, dating from 30 March 1528. In these early modern chronicles it is mentioned that King Petru Rares gave his grandson, Lashko-Voda from Isnovet, three other villages, two of which were situated around Isnovet River. When the

Soviet Union The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...

gained control under

, there was an order to destroy the wine collection, but the workers made a secret door where they stored the collection.

Wine cellars

Stretching for , of which only are currently in use, the Mileștii Mici cellar complex is the largest in the world. In 2007, the Mileștii Mici wine cellars were noted in the Guinness World Records 2007 Yearbook, for having the largest (2 million bottles) wine collection in the world.

References

External links

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Mileștii Mici winery official website
Communes of Ialoveni District {{Ialoveni-geo-stub