Beşalma 2

Any trip to the south of Moldova should include a visit to the museum in the village of Beşalma devoted to Gagauz history and ethnography. I made my first trek out to Beşalma in 2010, and this year I thought a second pilgrimage was in order.

Beşalma

First, a brief digression about villages. We don’t really have villages in America; we have towns. A village is essentially a place where people have been living and farming for a long time. There are very few amenities in a village. They usually have one or two churches, a few stores, a bar, a mayor’s office, a few schools, and the rest is individual houses with vegetable gardens. Villages are not always tiny; they usually have a population of at least several thousand.

If you’re still not sure if you’re in a village, ask this question: Are the toilets indoor or outdoor? If the toilets are outdoor, you’re in a village.

There are two basic reasons this museum is so cool. First of all, it’s in a village! Villages are not exactly known for being centers of culture, so it’s incredibly strange to find a good museum in a place where the main occupations seem to be farming and shepherding. 

 Nobody understood why Karaçoban wanted this stuff!

Secondly, the museum’s founder Dimitri Karaçoban, completely on his own, without any help from the government, collected all of the objects in the museum and designed the exhibitions. Mind you, this was during the Soviet period, when nobody did anything that wasn’t sponsored by the government. Moreover, in the 1960s and ‘70s, people though it was completely bizarre that Karaçoban wanted to make a museum dedicated to Gagauz culture. During the time that Karaçoban was collecting Gagauz artifacts and making films about village life, the Gagauz language wasn’t even being taught in schools and hardly any books in Gagauz were being published. 

But first some more background about Dimitri Karaçoban. He was born in 1933 and graduated from the Maxim Gorky Literary Institute in Leningrad in the early 1960s. This in itself was amazing at the time. Karaçoban’s community was ravaged by war, repression and famine in the 1940s. Illiteracy among the Gagauz was very common at the beginning of the early Soviet period. Literacy rates increased considerably in the early 1950s thanks to Soviet literacy campaigns, but many people still only finished elementary school before economic necessity forced them to quit school and start working. So Dimitri Karaçoban’s matriculation at the Literary Institute was like a Native American kid from the rez enrolling at Harvard. It was incredibly rare.

According to my host dad Grigori, who grew up in Beşalma, after Karaçoban graduated from the Literary Institute, he could have taken a prestigious job in Chisinau and worked there. But Karaçoban turned them down. All he wanted to do was go back to Beşalma and write poetry. And so he did, riding around town on his bicycle, periodically pausing to jot down his latest stanza. The government-controlled publishing houses weren’t interested in publishing Karaçoban’s poetry, so he and his wife were poor. All the same, they were well-liked in the village, and kids like my host dad would come visit them and listen to Dimitri recite his poetry.

Display of books by Karaçoban in the museum

After the so-called national-awakening of the 1980’s and ‘90s, the museum started to get the respect and funding it deserved. I made the trek to Beşalma with a researcher from the Czech Republic to check it out once more.

This is a collection of women's tools from a traditional Gagauz home. In front you have a loom, in back you have a stove. If you look closely, you can see irons above the stove!

This is where people stomped on the grapes when making wine. Quaint as that is, I'm rather glad they don't make wine that way anymore.

I know this looks like a medieval torture device, but it's actually for making wine.

Moldova was caught between the Red Army and Romanian fascist troops during World War II. The shoes on the left belonged to a Beşalma resident who was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp. According to the guide, these are the shoes he wore as he made the long journey home after the war.

This is actually a sleigh. I'd like to ride around on this thing!

Much like in the U.S., handmade embroidery was an important part of a woman's dowry. This time around, I watched a short film of Gagauz wedding traditions recorded by Karaçoban in the 1960s. It could have been recorded in the 1860s! It was awesome to see—in color!—the lively wedding festivities. I don't have room here to describe them all, but one did involve making the couple kiss over a goose. The problem is that the goose generally tries to interfere.

We got to hear some traditional violin music in the film.

My travel companion Milan gamely made the 2 km trek with me to the cemetery to pay our respects to the grave of Karaçoban and his wife. The director of the museum was quite embarrassed about the weedy state of the cemetery and warned us in advance.

The humble grave of Lyudmila Pokrovskaya, a professor of Turkology from Leningrad who made the trek to Gagauzia to create a Cyrillic alphabet for the Gagauz language in 1957. Upon her death in 2009, she requested to be buried in Beşalma.

Dimitri and Zinaida Karaçoban