In addition, increasing numbers of serfs (like Savva Purlevsky) were abandoning their villages and fleeing to the cities or to regions where they could conceal their servile status and find work as free men. In 1856 it was reported that more than 100,000 servile Romanian peasant families had abandoned their holdings and left for Bulgaria, Serbia and Transylvania since 1832 in search of freedom. By the 1860s some 300,000 runaway Russian and Ukrainian serfs were said to be living in Bessarabia, where serfdom had recently been abolished.
