#Exhibit of the Month

The 21 beads form part of a bronze hoard found in 2019 within a forested area close to the town of Nisporeni. Alongside the beads, the hoard included numerous bronze ornaments (2 Röschitz-Sanislău-type fibulae, 7 necklaces, 12 rings, 22 tubes, 23 bracelets, and approximately 80 appliqués), one coral bead and a pendant made from a wild animal's tooth. At present, the amber beads are preserved in the collections of the Muzeul Național de Istorie a Moldovei, while the remainder of the hoard is in the possession of a private collector.
The hoard was discovered accidentally in a pit about 50 cm deep. The objects in this hoard are of Western origin, with known parallels in archaeological complexes from Poland, Hungary, Serbia, and Slovakia, and, to a lesser extent, in Romania. The presence of this bronze hoard on the territory of the Republic of Moldova illustrates the cultural dynamics of the region during the Early Iron Age and a fundamental shift in the vector of cultural influences from east to west.

The amber bead strand comprises 16 whole beads and five fragmentary ones. They have an elongated biconical shape and vary in size. The beads are brown-reddish in color; their lengths range from 1.1 to 3.1 cm, widths from 0.6 to 1.4 cm, thicknesses from 0.6 to 1.1 cm, and the perforation diameter ranges between 0.2 and 0.3 cm.
Amber beads appear in several bronze hoards dated to the Late Bronze Age in the eastern half of Slovakia and in Transdanubian Hungary. Parallels are also known from the Cioclovina Cave in Romania. With the onset of the Iron Age, amber items disappear from the Carpathian Basin for approximately 300 years, reappearing alongside the arrival of Scythian elements.
The bronze hoard discovered at Nisporeni is dated to the HaA2-HaB1-2 interval (1050/1000 - 800/750 B.C.).

Virtual Tour

Exhibitions

„Soviet Moldova: Between Myths and the Gulag”

Exhibition of the Museum of the Victims of Deportations and Political Repressions

This is the first exhibition of the Museum of the Victims of Deportations and Political Repressions, which is a branch of the National Museum of History of Moldova. The exhibition presents phenomenon of totalitarianism in the general historical context of the Soviet era. By using specific museum means authors of the exhibition have tried to present to the public two components of Soviet society: the illusory world of the adherents of the "Soviet Dream", who naively believed in the ideals of freedom and justice, the "bright future" depicted by Soviet propaganda, and the world of those who had to know the hell of communist camps and prisons.

The exhibition brings together about 700 museum pieces: photographs, documents, letters from Siberia, posters of those years, personal belongings of former deportees and political prisoners, lists of confiscated property, memoirs of witnesses and survivors of the Soviet Gulag. There are exhibited for the first time some materials and documents from former KGB archives referring to the persons subjected to repressions for their political and religious beliefs.

According to incomplete data, from 1920 to 1951 in MASSR and MSSR 31,677 people were convicted for "political crimes", of whom more than five thousand were sentenced to death. Other three thousand people have died in prison.

About 60,000 people were deported during the three deportations nationwide: June 1941, July 1949, and 1 April 1951.

Objects presented in the museum exhibition "Soviet Moldova: Between Myths and the Gulag" tell us about the tragedy of these people with incredible destinies.

It is not an ordinary exhibition, but a small memorial of pain and humiliation of the victims of the Great Terror, an exhibition that reminds contemporaries about totalitarian communist past, the past that we should know, which must remain in history and never repeat.

Exhibition „Soviet Moldova: Between Myths and the Gulag”