Russia's national poet lived for three years in Bessarabian exile in Chisinau, and the small house where he stayed his first months — a single-storey whitewashed cottage on Anton Pann Street — was preserved as a museum in 1948. It is a modest space: four rooms with period furniture, manuscripts, first editions, and Pushkin's death mask cast in 1837.
The garden has a small bronze bust and a wooden bench reproduction of the kind Pushkin used. For Russian-literature pilgrims this is an essential stop; for casual visitors the appeal is the time-capsule cottage itself, which gives a clearer picture of small-town Bessarabian life in the 1820s than any of the city's bigger museums. Closed Mondays.