#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 Anastasia Rizo, of noble origin, 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 exercises in 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 composite, taken in 1911 at the 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. Among the teaching staff was Paraskovia 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."

On the reverse of the vignette is a label from the store and workshop of frames, paintings, mirrors, and window glass owned by A. D. Kon'gova, Chișinău, Gogol Street no. 37, near the State Bank.

This graduation composite was donated at the end of 2025 to the National Museum of History of Moldova by the Dadiștian family from Drochia.

Virtual Tour

Informatization

The process of continuous enrichment of the museum collections has led to the need for an automated system of registration of material cultural values.

Thus, in 1994 specialists of the Department of Informatics and Programming of the State University of Moldova, in accordance with the program of the museum administration and in collaboration with the Institute for Cultural Memory of the Ministry of Culture of Romania, has created the Automated System for Registration of Museum Collections (ASRMC).

ASRMC is a unified system of documentary databases, which includes documents and images on all the collections of the National Museum of History of Moldova, registered through scientific cataloging as a result of identification of the objects, their typology, classification, and grouping on specific criteria.

In 1996 the process of creation of the databases for museum collections has started. Since then, the museum staff is working on filling the special analytical cards for the scientific description of the exhibits. These cards arrive in the Department of Informatics of the museum, where operators enter the obtained data in the databases.

At present the databases on the collections of the National Museum of History of Moldova contain about 109,349 records on storage units for the following fields: archeology, coins, medals, documents, photographs, books, decorative arts, fine arts, history, and ethnography.

Using the Automated System for Registration of Museum Collections provides rapid retrieval of information on the various thematic criteria, cataloging of collections and exhibitions.

#Exhibit of the Month

Vignette of Graduates and Teachers of the Chișinău Diocesan Girls’ School, 1911

Informatization

#Exhibit of the Month