The National Museum of Ethnography and Natural History celebrates 135 years of its establishment through the exhibition "Generations of museographers-photographers at the service of society. Homage to the Museum at 135 years". The exhibition is a visual testimony of the contribution of museographers and photographers to documenting rural traditions and life, IPN reports.
The event brought together friends and employees of the museum, as well as representatives of the culture authorities, who underlined the essential role played by the institution in protecting and promoting the national heritage.
Museum of Ethnography and Natural History director Petru Vicol explained that at the anniversary exhibition, emphasis was on the remarkable figures of the institution, such as Franz and Albina Ostermann, who immortalized ethnographic objects and social moments from the interwar period in archive images, as well as ethnographer Sergei Boboc, who in the 1960s-1970s photographed Moldovan villages, capturing the traditional architecture and rural way of life, specific to that period. Those unique photographs reveal the essence of the villages of yesteryear, cultural heritage that, unfortunately, today is almost lost.
Director of the Romanian Cultural Institute Chisinau Monica Babuc highlighted the long relationship of the Romanian Cultural Institute with the National Museum of Ethnography and Natural History. "This institution plays a fundamental role in the preservation of Romanian and Moldovan cultural values, and our cooperation for the inclusion of common cultural elements in the UNESCO Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage confirms the impact of the museum in a regional and international context," said Monica Babuc.
The National Museum of Ethnography and Natural History was founded in 1889 as a result of the Agricultural and Industrial Exhibition mounted by the Bessarabian Zemstvo. Since then, the institution has gradually expanded its collections and fields of research, preserving about 200,000 objects. The museum’s building, erected between 1903 and 1905 according to the project of architect Vladimir Țîganco, is considered an architectural monument of national importance. Its permanent and temporary exhibitions reflect the evolution of society and the relationship between humans and nature, as well as the diversity of the cultural and natural heritage of the Republic of Moldova.
The anniversary exhibition will be open to the public in the coming months, offering visitors the opportunity to discover the values and history of the Moldovan rural community through the angle of the photographs archived by the museum during over 100 years.
