Iași built its identity in printing houses, literary salons and concert halls rather than on trade routes. Three days here move from Vasile Lupu's carved stone churches to the Junimea circle's mansion, a Fellner & Helmer theatre and the Jewish quarter.
Vasile Lupu's 1639 church is carved head to foot in some 30 horizontal bands of stone lace mixing Ottoman, Armenian and Georgian motifs. Inside rest the tombs of Dimitrie Cantemir and Alexandru Ioan Cuza. Open daily 08:00–20:00.
Adolf Braunstein's 1914 corner block anchors Piața Unirii with Secession bay windows and ironwork. Walk from it up pedestrian Lăpușneanu past the 1832 Roznovanu Palace, now city hall, and a row of neoclassical merchant façades.
The Artists' Union gallery on Cuza Vodă is the city's longest-running contemporary space. Group shows of Moldavian painting, graphics, textile and ceramics rotate roughly every three weeks, usually hung by the artists themselves.
Romania's largest Orthodox cathedral, begun 1833 and finished 1887 after the vaults collapsed. A Renaissance-revival hall frescoed by Gheorghe Tattarescu; the relics of St Parascheva draw pilgrim queues every October.
Vasile Pogor's 1850 mansion hosted the Junimea literary circle that shaped modern Romanian letters. Since 2019 its rooms hold five compact museums — poetry, childhood, Jewish Iași, the 1941 Pogrom — with the Junimea salon upstairs.
The 1677 stone house where Metropolitan Dosoftei ran Moldavia's second printing press, now a museum of old Romanian writing: hand-set type, illuminated psalters and Cyrillic manuscripts under a low vaulted ceiling.
Cuza Vodă 29 houses both the Moldova State Philharmonic, founded 1942, and the Museum of Theatre, with costumes, set models and playbills from Iași's 19th-century stage. Concert season runs September to June, mostly Friday nights.
Romania's oldest national theatre, founded 1840 and housed since 1896 in a Fellner & Helmer baroque pile with a Venetian glass chandelier and an allegorical painted curtain. The National Opera shares the same stage.
The two-room wattle-and-daub cottage where Ion Creangă wrote Childhood Memories opened in 1918 as Romania's first memorial house. Clay floor, painted dowry chest, low stove — and the steep lane Eminescu climbed to visit him.
Built in 1670 and the oldest surviving synagogue in Romania, sunk half a floor below street level with a Baroque-vaulted ceiling. Outside stands the menorah monument to the 13,000 killed in the June 1941 Iași pogrom.
Founded 1834, the oldest natural history museum in Romania: Empire-era wooden cabinets, hand-inked specimen labels and stuffed fauna arranged as the 19th century saw them. Alexandru Ioan Cuza was proclaimed ruler in its Elefterie hall in 1859.
The city's independent arts centre in the working-class Tătărași district programmes small-cast theatre, recitals and film outside the National's orbit — the venue where Iași's younger companies and student directors actually get staged.