bender

Some will recognize here the last name of one of Russian literatureâ's most famous heroes: Ostap Bender, from Ilf and Petrov's The Twelve Chairs and The Little Golden Calf. Bender came into being as a Moldavian fort, then was conquered by the Turks in the sixteenth century, then was conquered by the Russians in the early nineteenth century, but it became part of Romania in 1918, and was Romanian when The Little Golden Calf was written. Notably, it is to Romania, at the end of the second novel, that Bender attempts to escape.