#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.

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Exhibitions

"The Ukrainian universe of Maria Prymachenko in Chisinau"

May 10 – June 30, 2023

The Polish Institute in Bucharest will present on the fence of the National Museum of History of Moldova, an exhibition dedicated to the Ukrainian folk art artist Maria Prymachenko. It is an opportunity for our countries to express their support for Ukraine in these difficult days of the war. The exhibition "Ukrainian Universe of Maria Prymachenko" can be visited from May 10 to June 30, 2023.

The Museum of History and Ethnography in Ivankiv, located in the Kyiv region, burned down during the Russian invasion on February 27, 2022. In its collection were 25 works belonging to the Ukrainian artist Maria Prymachenko. Some of them managed to be saved by the inhabitants of the city, who took them out of the burning building.

The universe of naive painters is broken from reality, full of fantastic creatures and plants. For them, such a way of painting is absolutely normal. For us, however, trained in academic painting, studying a work that requires a lot of our attention and in-depth knowledge of plants, animals, and people challenges us to call upon our own intuition. So let's focus on Maria Prymachenko's paintings. They are beautiful, colourful, full of eccentric creatures and plants. There is nothing accidental in this, as Maria grew up in a family where all its members had artistic talent. Grandmother had specialized in dyeing Easter eggs, father had been an accomplished carpenter, and mother had enjoyed embroidery. All this entourage, the fact that she kept an eye on what her father was doing, the attraction to the ornaments on the embroideries and kilims of her mother's work had a strong impact on her art. In the rich ornamentation of Prymachenko's works, similar to that used in Ukrainian embroideries, we find the fantastic creatures mentioned above. There were voices that attributed their presence to the illness and suffering she went through. Maria had Heine-Medina disease, also called poliomyelitis or infantile paralysis, which undoubtedly had a strong impact on her psyche and affected her entire life, including her physical condition. Because of this, he only completed four primary grades, having practically no chance to become known to the general public.

The artist spent the last eight years of her life confined to bed. He painted, taught and received guests until his last moments. He died on August 18, 1997, in the same village where he was born. She was awarded the "Taras Shevchenko" National Award for services to the art of the USSR, and UNESCO declared 2009 as the Year of Maria Prymachenko. In his memory, a small planet was named "14624 Prymachenko". After visiting an exhibition of Prymachenko's works in Paris, Pablo Picasso said: "I bow before the artistic wonders of this brilliant Ukrainian."

The opening of the exhibition will take place on May 10, at 11:00 a.m., in the courtyard of the museum. The exhibition "Ukrainian Universe of Maria Prymachenko" can be visited on the fence of the National Museum of History of Moldova between May 10 and June 10, 2023, 31 August 1989 street, 121A.