#Exhibit of the Month

One of the great technical achievements that revolutionized the idea of time and space, opening a new era in the history of communication, is telegraphy. It is based on the transmission of electrical signals through a cable over long distances, allowing people to communicate instantly. The telegraph spread very quickly and a network of wires stretched around the world.

In 1837, the American painter and physicist Samuel Morse invented the first electromagnetic device for telegraphy, patented in 1840. To send messages by wire, Morse developed in 1838 a simple code of dots and dashes, which represented the letters of the alphabet, known as "Morse code ".

Both Morse code and the telegraph machine were improved over time, with the telegraph becoming the most widespread system of communication and information transmission for more than a century, until the advent of the Internet. The telegraph system consisted of a series of stations repeaters along the transmission line route. Each station had an operator who received and transmitted messages by telegraph. The Morse machine transmitted about 25 words per minute, which were recorded in code on a paper tape. The operator in charge of transmitting the message would decode it and write it on paper using a special typewriter.

In Bessarabia, the telegraph entered in 1860: on April 8, the Bender telegraph station began its activity, and on April 24, the one in Chisinau, following the construction of the first Odesa-Chisinau-Leova telegraph line. Currently, telegraph services have been discontinued. The only ones who still use coded communication are radio amateurs.

The Morse telegraph machine shown comes from the Osinoostrovsky electrotechnical plant, Soviet Union, and dates back to 1934. The exhibit was restored by Mihail Culașco.

Virtual Tour

Exhibitions

“Childhood in the Gulag”

National Museum of the Union Alba Iulia

May 23 – June 30, 2023

On May 23, 2023, at the National Museum of the Union in Alba Iulia, Romania, the inauguration ceremony of the photo-documentary exhibition "Childhood in the Gulag" (curator Ludmila D. Cojocaru) took place. The exhibition presents images about the life of Bessarabian children condemned by the totalitarian-communist regime of the Moldavian SSR to deportation, starvation, Russification, indoctrination, forced excision from their own families, during the years 1940-1941 and 1944-1953.

At the opening of the event, the vice-president of the Alba Iulia County Council, Mr. Dumitru Fulea, greeted the guests and thanked the National Museum of History of Moldova and the National Museum of the Union in Alba Iulia for the joint effort in presenting the traumatic pages of the past toward a large audience. The concept of the exhibition was presented by Dr. Ludmila D. Cojocaru and Dr. Virgiliu Bîrlădeanu, relating on the actuality of the recovering, documentation and historical investigation of the testimonies of the victims of the totalitarian-communist regime in Bessarabia. The director of the National Museum of the Union Alba Iulia, Mr. Gabriel Rustoiu, referred to the prospects of bilateral cooperation regarding the dissemination of historical knowledge through museographical activities, especially among the young generation on both banks of the Prut River.

The exhibition brings together about 180 photo-documentary images, accompanied by memories and archival documents from the collections of the National History Museum of Moldova, the Edineț County Museum, the Museum of History and Ethnography in Soroca, the INIS ProMemoria Archive of the MSU, as well as from the archives of the communities memory and of the survivors of the totalitarian-communist regime in the Moldavian SSR.

The exhibition presented in Alba Iulia is a homage to the children who went through the atrocities of the totalitarian-communist regime in the USSR, as well as an action condemning the war launched by the Russian Federation against Ukraine.

The photo-documentary exhibition „Childhood in the Gulag" can be visited between May 23 - June 30, 2023, at the headquarters of the National Museum of the Union in Alba Iulia (str. Mihai Viteazul 12-14, mun. Alba Iulia, Romania).

The Opening of the photo-documentary exhibition „Childhood in the Gulag" was organized within the project „Edification of a European culture of memory by promoting intergenerational communication and cross-border cooperation. Exchange and implementation of the best practices between Lithuania and Moldova", with the support of the „The Development Cooperation and Democracy Promotion Programme" of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Lithuania.