The Tighina Fortress (Cetatea Tighina, called Bender by the Turks) is the city's defining landmark and the reason most travellers cross the river to come here at all. The site has been fortified since at least the fifteenth century, when Stephen the Great of Moldavia built an earth-and-wood stronghold on the bluff above the Dniester. In 1538 Suleiman the Magnificent captured it, rebuilt it in stone, and turned it into one of the principal Ottoman forts in the region — a role it kept for over two centuries.
The walls are still largely intact and impressive: a long curtain of dressed stone enclosing a citadel, an outer bailey, and a series of bastions overlooking the river. The fortress saw repeated sieges during the eighteenth-century Russo-Turkish wars; Russian forces took it three times before annexing it definitively in 1812. Used as a Russian and later Soviet military base, it was closed to the public for most of the twentieth century and only opened as a museum in 2008. Inside there are small exhibitions on Moldovan, Ottoman and Russian periods, and the views from the ramparts over the Dniester are the best in the city.
Practicalities: the fortress is administered by Transnistria. Visitors generally enter on a guided trip from Tiraspol or Chisinau; foreign passport holders are usually waved through the checkpoint with little fuss.