#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.

Virtual Tour

Events Archive

Itinerant exhibition “Caravan of memories from the Gulag”, at the National Museum of History of Moldova

July 19, 2024

On July 19, in the courtyard of the National Museum of History of Moldova, the Opening of the traveling exhibition "Caravan of memories from the Gulag" took place, which passed through several towns in Romania and the Republic of Moldova in order to talk to the larger public about the history and memory of the victims of the totalitarian-communist regime from the left of the Prut. The exhibition was organized by the National Museum of History of Moldova in partnership with the Association for Culture and Arts Arbor, originating from the exhibition "Remembering childhood: testimonies of Bessarabian deportees", opened as part of this cooperation in 2022, at Arbor.art.room in București.

The exhibition is based on the research component and is elaborated from a curatorial and interdisciplinary perspective, by building an installation with the testimonies of the deportees, with photographs, graphics, artworks, audio and video materials. Thus, for a better understanding of the redeployment of deportees to the "special settlements" and the trauma experienced on foreign land, the "Caravan of memories from the Gulag" presented oral history testimonies and photographic artefacts from the thematic heritage of the National Museum of History of Moldova, and among the special exhibits was the map of Bessarabians in the Gulag (2022) by Ramona Iacob, the animation Mîța fără nume (2022) by Ghenadie Popescu, the artworks Familia Pascal and Mother's shawl (2024) by Vasile Rață.

The "Caravan of memories from the Gulag" traveled between July 9-19, 2024, starting from București to Chișinău and making an exhibition stop in the evening, between 5:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m., in Focșani, Iași, Nisporeni, Plop (Dondușeni district), Drochia, Hâncești, Căușeni, Cahul, and Avdarma (ATU Gagauzia).

The head of the branch Museum of Victims of Deportations and Political Repressions, assoc. prof. dr. Ludmila Cojocaru, mentioned that "such itinerant exhibitions bring the memory of both banks of the Prut closer together and contribute, through concrete actions, to the building of a European commemorative culture in the Republic of Moldova".

The project manager of the "Caravan of Memories from the Gulag", Ms. Victoria Nagy Vajda, said that the project was initiated in 2022, its trigger being Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine. "I wanted to create an itinerary of several testimonies of different people from the moment they got up, the moment they went on the train, the impressions they had, the situation they were in at that moment, the moment they arrived, the jobs they were doing family members, especially parents or brothers, older sisters, the relationships they had with the school, and finally we have a testimony of Stalin's death and what this event meant to them."

In the context of a lasting war on the borders of the Republic of Moldova and Romania, that of the Russian Federation against Ukraine, the realization of the traveling exhibition "Caravan of memories from the Gulag" is necessary both for the historical knowledge on the Soviet occupation and for keeping alive the memory of the atrocities that happened then, for not to forget about the danger of totalitarianisms, in all times.