#Exhibit of the Month

The metal vessel was likely used as a funerary urn. It was found together with another vessel, shaped like a shell and used as a lid for the urn, in a landslide along the road within the Yahorlyk Nature Reserve, Dubăsari District. The village of Yahorlyk is located at the mouth of the stream of the same name, a left tributary of the Dniester River.
The vessel belongs to the Hemmoo type (or Eggers 63) and is a rare find in the late ancient sites of the 2nd-3rd centuries AD. Researchers consider this type of vessel to be of Italic, Gallo-Italic, or Mediterranean origin, frequently used as a funerary urn or burial inventory by the Bastarnae. Upon discovery, the vessel was reportedly filled with "earth and burnt bones."

The vessel was found together with a brass sheet vessel that had undulated or fluted walls. It has a height of 14.9 cm (without the base ring). The diameter of the vessel's body is 19.5 cm, and the total height is 16.2 cm. The rim of the vessel flares outward with a diameter of 20.5 cm. The vessel is made from thin brass sheet, only 0.1 cm thick. The upper part of the vessel is modestly ornamented. The middle of the rim, on the exterior, has a shallow horizontal line incised. The transition from the rim to the body is marked by a wide groove, 0.3 cm in width. From this groove, the rim thickens to 0.25 cm. On the upper part of the rim, on two symmetrically placed sides, semicircular handles with stepped bases were cut out. The handles are 2.2 cm in height and 5.1 cm in width. Including the "steps" at the base, the handles are 6.1 cm wide. In the middle of each handle, a circular elongated hole was made for the attachment of a handle, measuring 1.2 x 1.5 cm.

The ornamentation on the upper part of the vessel's body consists of two bands, each formed by two parallel incised lines, spaced 0.2 to 0.4 cm apart. The interval between the two bands is 0.9 cm. The vessel's handle is semicircular, mobile, fairly thick, rectangular in cross-section (0.8 x 0.9 cm), and made from a rounded brass bar. The ends of the handle are thinned to 0.6 cm and widened to 0.9 cm over a length of 2.6 cm, resembling bird heads. On the median part of the bar, incised marks resembling Roman numerals IX and XI are present. The bottom of the vessel was made from a separate brass sheet, worked by pressing on a lathe. Evidence of this process is the indentation from the lathe's fixing rod, preserved in the central part of the vessel's bottom. Surrounding this indentation is an ornament consisting of two bands of concentric lines, with diameters of 1.8 cm and 5.9 cm, respectively. The lower part of the vessel is raised and rests on a ringed base, formed by shaping the vessel's walls and bending the piece that formed the actual bottom. This base has a diameter of 8.7 cm.

For the North-West Pontic and East-Carpathian regions, several scattered sites or points where fragments of metal vessels were discovered, used as funerary inventory or urns, should be mentioned. These include discoveries from the funerary complexes of flat necropolises dated to the first centuries AD, at Hansca-Lutăria II and Dănceni-Ialoveni. Here, excavations identified noble graves with fragments of bronze vessels with metal handles, similar to the vessel from Yahorlyk.

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Exhibitions

“THE MEMORY OF DEPORTATIONS”

Exhibition dedicated to the commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the Stalinist deportations of July 5-6, 1949

July 3 – August 3, 2024

The National Museum of History of Moldova is organizing the opening of the exhibition "The Memory of Deportations" on Wednesday, July 3, 2024, at 13:15, in the upper floor hallway, dedicated to commemorating the 75th anniversary of the second wave of mass deportations in the Moldavian SSR.

The exhibition reveals aspects of the history and memory of the victims of Operation "South" from the night of July 5-6, 1949, bringing to the visitors' attention documentary materials, testimonies, personal belongings, artworks, and thematic video materials. The exhibited relics elucidate the context in which the organization of the second wave of deportations took place, the transportation and relocation of Bessarabians to special settlements in the eastern regions of the USSR, as well as recent practices of honoring the memory of the victims of the totalitarian-communist regime in the Moldavian SSR.

The imposed residency regime, harsh cold, limited bread rations, exhausting labor, and schooling of children in Russian were dictated by the state-party ideology concerning the liquidation of "enemies of the people" and political myths about educating the "Soviet Man" or the "happy childhood in the USSR." The memory and oral narratives of the survivors among the Bessarabians deported on the night of July 5-6, 1949, along with the relics presented in the exhibition documenting their history, highlight the suffering caused by separation from their own homes and confiscation of property earned through hard work, alienation from their native places and forced Russification, the sudden death of those who couldn't survive the horrors of the Soviet occupation, and the decades-long imposed silence by the totalitarian-communist regime in the Moldavian SSR.

The individuals deported as a result of Operation "South" had to adapt to extreme conditions, developing new roles and social networks: through interaction with the locals and local authorities; through integration, as much as possible, into the foreign cultural environment; through learning Russian, which was declared the official language of communication in the USSR; through performing political loyalty and practicing self-censorship, which facilitated reintegration into society and substituting the status of "enemy of the people" with that of "Soviet citizen."

Today, more than three decades after the signing of the Declaration of Independence (1991), the complex and systematic valorization of the memory of the victims of the totalitarian past in the Republic of Moldova remains a desideratum of decommunization and democratization. The local memory communities in the villages and cities of the Republic of Moldova offer examples and models worthy of being followed in the direction of knowing history and memory. The symbolic dimension of commemorative actions aims to constitute one of the main forms of (re)cognition and intelligent assumption of the traumatic past for the memory of the victims of the communist regime.

The exhibition presents an appeal to history and memory as an act of symbolic justice brought to all the victims of Operation "South" from July 5-6, 1949, in the Moldavian SSR, thus contributing to the building of a European culture of memory in the society of the Republic of Moldova.

The exhibition "The Memory of Deportations" will be open for visits from July 3 to August 3, 2024, in the upper floor hallway of the National Museum of History of Moldova (Chișinău, 121A, 31 August 1989 St.).