#Exhibit of the Month

The history of silverware goes back over 5,000 years, but only in the 3rd millennium BC, in Mesopotamia and Anatolia, the first pieces of processed silver were made. From there, the art of working with silver spread to Persia and to Europe, where already in Roman and Greek antiquity it reached a high level of skill. Many of the techniques used then, such as casting, embossing and engraving, are still used today.

The National Museum of History of Moldova possesses a rich collection of silver items, which in a special way reflects the everyday life of people of the 18th-20th centuries. The typological range of objects that make up the collection includes both secular and ecclesiastical silverware: fruit vases, bonbonnieres, cutlery, tea and coffee preparation and serving sets, salt-cellars, handbags, snuffboxes and cigarette cases, candelabra, as well as icon cases, chalices, pectoral crosses, candlesticks, and so on.

Products of renowned jewelers, such as Fabergé, Khlebnikov, Sazikov in Russia, Elkington in England, Christofle in France or Norblin and Fraget in Poland stand out for their special quality and luxury. A significant item in the museum's silverware collection is the teapot on a stand with a spirit lamp (bouillotte), made in the Christofle workshop in France.

The Christofle workshop was founded in Paris in 1830 by Charles Christofle. The workshop, which was the court supplier of the Emperor of France Napoleon III, the Emperor of Mexico and the Tsar of Russia, created decorative and household pieces of rare beauty. It was also highly appreciated by the Royal House of Romania, which granted the workshop a supplier patent. In 1842, Charles Christofle bought a patent for electroplating, a technique that involved first coating a metal base with copper and then with nickel and silver. It was this technique that allowed him to mass-produce silver tea sets, which were very popular at the time. Tea, brought to Europe in 1610 by the East India Company, was an expensive commodity that gradually gained popularity. The oldest preserved teapots, dating from the 1670s, were small. As tea gained popularity, larger teapots began to be produced, shaped to match the fashion of the time.

According to Christofle catalogs, the model was produced in 1868 and fascinates with its elegance and refinement. The teapot has a complex design including a pear-shaped container, the surface of which is ornamented with guilloché in the Louis XVI style of the late 1780s. In the upper and lower parts of the body it is decorated with a border with tulips on protrusions, and in the center, it has an escutcheon with an engraved double frame. The teapot is equipped with a folding basket-like handle decorated with triple rings, and a lid with a knob. There are two rivets on the teapot for attaching it to the stand. A spirit lamp with a straight handle and a device for lifting the wick is fixed in the middle of the stand. The item has the Christofle stamp and is made of nickel silver.

The teapot on a stand with a spirit lamp, made in the Christofle workshop, harmoniously combines the value of a unique object and a sample of a large industrial series.

Dimensions: H.: 43 cm; W.: 24 cm.

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”