#Exhibit of the Month

One of the great technical achievements that revolutionized the idea of time and space, opening a new era in the history of communication, is telegraphy. It is based on the transmission of electrical signals through a cable over long distances, allowing people to communicate instantly. The telegraph spread very quickly and a network of wires stretched around the world.

In 1837, the American painter and physicist Samuel Morse invented the first electromagnetic device for telegraphy, patented in 1840. To send messages by wire, Morse developed in 1838 a simple code of dots and dashes, which represented the letters of the alphabet, known as "Morse code ".

Both Morse code and the telegraph machine were improved over time, with the telegraph becoming the most widespread system of communication and information transmission for more than a century, until the advent of the Internet. The telegraph system consisted of a series of stations repeaters along the transmission line route. Each station had an operator who received and transmitted messages by telegraph. The Morse machine transmitted about 25 words per minute, which were recorded in code on a paper tape. The operator in charge of transmitting the message would decode it and write it on paper using a special typewriter.

In Bessarabia, the telegraph entered in 1860: on April 8, the Bender telegraph station began its activity, and on April 24, the one in Chisinau, following the construction of the first Odesa-Chisinau-Leova telegraph line. Currently, telegraph services have been discontinued. The only ones who still use coded communication are radio amateurs.

The Morse telegraph machine shown comes from the Osinoostrovsky electrotechnical plant, Soviet Union, and dates back to 1934. The exhibit was restored by Mihail Culașco.

Virtual Tour

Exhibitions

"Icon of Christ - living expression of the Gospel"

April 25 – August 18, 2024

The exhibition entitled "Icon of Christ - living expression of the Gospel" is dedicated to the collection of icons with a Christological theme from the heritage of the National Museum of History of Moldova. The exhibition aims to familiarize the visiting public with some of the ecclesiastical art objects from the museum's collection, many of these being exhibited for the first time.

As an essential part of life, icons embody the artistic preferences and worldviews of different segments of the population. The icons preserved in the museum collections represent the miniature model of the style and traditions of the local iconographic art. The exhibition includes significant cultural assets for their patrimonial, artistic, spiritual and memorialistic value.

About sixty icons from Bessarabia, Ukraine, Russia, Jerusalem and Greece are presented in the exhibition. The earliest icon dates from 1810, in its field the name of the author, the monk Evtaph, is also found, the latest comes from a monastery workshop in Greece, dating from the second half of the 20th century. Painted on wood and canvas, the icons represent various styles of iconographic art such as those of the Byzantine tradition and of the realist-academic manner, those that combine the baroque element, as well as those of naive expression. The exhibited icons represent the fruit of painters with special training and that of amateur painters, characteristics that evoke the iconographic expressions that shaped the Bessarabian icon in that period.

The distinctive element of the exhibition is the diversity of categories and styles of interpretation, of techniques and materials, of forms of realization - all this giving it authenticity and personality. Given the numerous presence of pieces of the same iconographic category, the criterion for displaying the icons is the typological one. The entire iconographic material has been systematized in five distinct compartments. The first thematic group is made up of the icons that evoke the "Evangelical Face of the Savior", a category that sums up the most iconographic types from the "Birth of the Lord" to the "Entombment". "The Face of Christ in Glory" includes the iconographic subjects - " The Transfiguration", the "Resurrection of the Lord" and the "Ascension of the Lord" - moments when the apostles are initiated into revelatory mysteries not yet known to them. The "unmade face of the Savior" is depicted in the icons "Mahram of King Abgar" and "Mahram of Veronica ", these representing the Achiropites", images on which, according to tradition, the face of the Savior miraculously appears.

The first representation is considered the "Byzantine" or Eastern face of God, printed on the handkerchief sent to King Abgar of Edessa, the second, also called the "Roman" or Western face, it reproduces the suffering face of the Lord on the face of Veronica, the woman who through the touch of the Saviour's garment healed the heavy afflictions. The "Good Shepherd" icons represent the "Symbolic Face of the Saviour", a face inspired by the Gospel, from the words and parables of the Saviour, rendered as deeply as it is sublime and pure in its spirituality. The iconographic types Jesus Christ "Vine", Jesus Christ "Pantocrator", Jesus Christ "Great Emperor" and Jesus Christ "High Priest" embody the "Liturgical Face of the Savior". The most numerous images in this compartment are those in which Jesus Christ is depicted in the posture of Pantocrator.Reproduced in about 40 icons, the most representative ones were selected for their artistic and spiritual messages.

Other liturgical objects from the museum's heritage were used as complementary material - pectoral crosses, candlesticks, chalices, censers, etc. The visiting public will have the opportunity to examine some enlarged details from the composition of the icons on display, placed separately, which may pleasantly surprise them.