#Exhibit of the Month

The Chișinău Diocesan Girls' School opened its doors on May 3, 1864, addressing a pressing need: in Bessarabia there were no institutions dedicated to the education of clergy's daughters. According to the 1864 circular, teaching was conducted in the Romanian language, a provision applied throughout the diocese. The school's first headmistress was noblewoman Anastasia Dmitrievna Rizo, invited by Archbishop Antonie.
The curriculum, approved by the Ministry of Public Education and the Chișinău Diocese, combined theoretical subjects with practical training. Students studied religion, reading and writing in Romanian, Slavonic, and Russian, arithmetic and mental calculation, world history and geography. The program was complemented by church singing and practical skills such as sewing, embroidery, knitting, as well as household management - baking bread and prosphora, preparing meals and preserves, caring for livestock, and cultivating gardens.
The vignette, created in 1911 at the photographic studio of Z. N. Sumovski in Chișinău, depicts 29 graduates and 13 teachers. At the center are portraits of Bishop Serafim (Ciciagov), headmistress N. R. Mihelson, teacher V. E. Bejerian, and priests F. Ghiliarov and P. Jurikas. A notable figure is Praskovia Vasilievna Cuciurenko, a calligraphy teacher for 37 years, who in 1911 became senior educator and assistant headmistress. For her dedication, she was awarded the gold medal "For Long Service."
By 1911, the school had 648 students across 17 classes. Its library contained 7,414 volumes, including 3,955 for students and 3,459 for teachers. Graduates, often becoming priests' wives or teachers in rural and urban schools, contributed to spreading faith and moral education, strengthening the cultural and spiritual role of the institution.
On the reverse of the vignette is a label reading: "Store and workshop for frames, paintings, mirrors, and window glass, A. D. Kon'gova, Chișinău, Gogol Street no. 37, next to the State Bank."
This unique vignette was donated at the end of 2025 to the National Museum of History of Moldova by the Dadiștian family from Drochia.

Virtual Tour

Exhibitions

“CHILDHOOD IN THE GULAG”

The Senate of the Romanian Parliament

20-31 May 2024

At 20 May, 2024, the National Museum of History of Moldova, in partnership with the Embassy of the Republic of Moldova in Romania and the Senate of the Romanian Parliament, organized a new opening of the traveling exhibition "Childhood in the Gulag" (curator Dr. Ludmila D. Cojocaru). The event takes place in the context of the 75th anniversary commemorated in 2024 of the second and largest wave of Stalinist deportations from Bessarabia, which took place on July 5-6, 1949.

The exhibition "Childhood in the Gulag" presents photo-documentary images that reflect the life of Bessarabian children condemned to deportation, starvation, Russification, indoctrination and forced separation from their own families based on the repressive policies of the totalitarian-communist regime in the Moldavian SSR, in the period 1940-1941 and 1944-1953.

The exhibition brings together around 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 Pro Memory Institute, from the archives of the memory communities, as well as family archives of the victims of the totalitarian-communist regime in the Moldavian SSR.

The exhibition is a homage to the children who went through the atrocities of the totalitarian-communist regime in the USSR, a sign of memory to the innocent victims, a gesture of symbolic justice towards the Bessarabian children who went through the Gulag.

The event was attended by members of the diplomatic corps accredited in Bucharest, representatives of state institutions in Romania, but also historians and those interested in the history of the Republic of Moldova.

The exhibition is opened in the foyer of the Plenary Hall of the Senate of the Romanian Parliament (Bucharest, Palatul Parlamentului, str. Izvor, no. 2-4) until May 31, 2024.

The photo-documentary exhibition "Childhood in the Gulag" was elaborated with the support of "The Development Cooperation and Democracy Promotion Programme" of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Lithuania.