#Exhibit of the Month

The ceramic vessel set was discovered accidentally in October 2025 in the southwestern part of the village of Bălceana, Hâncești District, approximately 1.2 km from the Lăpușnița River. The archaeological materials were recovered by the National Archaeological Agency.

The ceramic assemblage consists of a large storage vessel (pithos) with a capacity of 20 litres (h = 39.2 cm; d = 35.0 cm), decorated with a raised band below the rim; a medium-sized bowl with a capacity of 2.5 litres (h = 16.9 cm; d = 23.2 cm); a medium-sized jug with a capacity of 0.6 litres (h = 12.0 cm; d = 13.4 cm); and the base of a jar-shaped vessel.

The coarse handmade pottery was produced using the coil-building technique, by stacking and shaping coils of clay prepared from a paste tempered with crushed fired clay (grog) and sand. The vessel surfaces are uneven and covered with a yellowish-red slip featuring black patches, while the core of the vessel walls is black in colour.

The three vessels preserved intact display well-defined biconical shapes, with their maximum diameter at the middle of the body and straight or slightly oblique rims with rounded edges. Pottery of this type is characteristic of the Early Medieval cultural area of the northern and northwestern Black Sea region, dating from the 5th to the 7th centuries. East of the Dniester River, on the territory of present-day Ukraine, analogous pottery is found in Penkovka-type settlements, while in the Carpathian-Dniester region it is characteristic of settlements belonging to the Costișa-Botoșana-Hansca cultural group.

Within the Prut-Dniester region, coarse biconical pottery is generally represented by fragments and only relatively rarely by complete vessels, such as those discovered at Hansca, Dănceni, Recea, Seliște, Păhărniceni, and other sites. This type of pottery constituted an indispensable component of the local material culture during the 5th-7th centuries. In this context, the discovery at Bălceana of an almost intact set of coarse biconical vessels represents a relatively rare find of considerable scientific importance.

According to certain hypotheses, the tradition of coarse biconical pottery dating to the 5th-7th centuries originated in the North Pontic region. At the same time, it cannot be ruled out that these biconical ceramic vessels were the result of contemporary ethnocultural interactions, developing simultaneously across the vast territory extending from the Carpathian Mountains to the Dnieper River and the Seversky Donets.

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Exhibitions

“Sybir – Prison of Nations”

Museum of History and Ethnography of Telenești

June 2 - August 2, 2026

The exhibition "Sybir - prison of nations" presents a history in which each of us or our loved ones can find ourselves, including our parents and grandparents. It tells about the history of the Second World War. However, it does not focus on military operations and, certainly, they are not the main subject. Instead, photo-documentary testimonies of people under Soviet occupation during the Second World War are presented to the larger public.

The exhibition describes the drama of the lives of Polish citizens, from the invasion of Poland by the Soviet Union on September 17, 1939, through mass deportations, imprisonment and labor camps, to the chance to leave the Soviet Union - first with the Army of General Anders, then with the units led by Zygmunt Berling and, finally, during the return home after the end of the war. Part of the common history of Central and Eastern Europe, following the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, the history and memory of the inhabitants of Bessarabia after the establishment of the Soviet occupation in the region is presented.

The exhibition approach reveals the drama of Stalinist deportations, forced labor, harsh cold, difficult living conditions and lack of rights of those who went through the Gulag. At the same time, the exhibition message brings to the attention of visitors the fact that in the midst of this atrocious existence, the hope of reuniting with loved ones, homesickness and Christian faith remained for many of the deportees the only sources of resistance and survival. For years, their memories were overlooked, and today they are "an open book about our common past".

The sources of the photographs and oral history testimonies come from the collection of the Sybir Memorial Museum, the collection of the National Museum of History of Moldova, Tomasz Kizny's album GULAG, the public domain.

The exhibition is the result of cooperation between the Sybir Memorial Museum (Muzeum Pamięci Sybiru) in Bialystok, the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in the Republic of Moldova, and the National Museum of History of Moldova.

The exhibition will be open to the public until August 2, 2026, at the Museum of History and Ethnography of Telenești (str. Ciprian Porumbescu, nr. 8).