Moldova's National History Museum

The National Museum of Archaeology and History of Moldova

(Note the slightly creepy Romulus and Remus statue emphasizing their Roman roots!)

When I was in Chisinau, I decided to be a tourist and visit the national history museum. Much to my shame as a history major, I had never visited this museum. Museums can be a bit of a dodgy business in Eastern Europe since you never know if they’re going to be amazing or deadly boring. The World War II museum in Kiev, for example, has some of the most spatially creative exhibits I have ever seen in a museum. Unfortunately, most museums follow the formula of putting old stuff behind glass and accompanying them with fascinating explanations such as “Jar. XIX century.” If at all possible, I try to stick to ethnographic museums since they usually give you a concrete sense of how people actually lived.

The Moldovan historical museum was indeed on the boring side, but I enjoyed myself anyways. First of all, the ticket lady was nice, which is always a pleasant way to start off. The museum itself was interesting because it reflected the ongoing arguments that exist over Moldova’s place in history and its future path. To start, there was a special exhibit about the occupation of Moldova by the Soviets during World War II that was entirely in Moldovan/Romanian. The territory of today’s Moldova basically went back and forth between the Allies (the Soviet Union) and the Axis (Romania) during the war. The fact that the exhibit was entirely in Moldovan/Romanian lets you know which side the exhibit was on. (Hint: not Russia.)

Then there were the obligatory rooms with lots of dusty clay vessels and rusty bits of old jewelry. Not really my cup of tea, but it’s fun to see stuff that is 2000 years old. Then there were some rooms with old icons, armor, and swords. Very Game of Thrones. You can really imagine Ned Stark clomping around in this stuff. There was also an interesting exhibit of artifacts from the Ottoman period.

Next comes the fun stuff: more historical debates! The people who created the museum were not very big fans of the Russian Empire, and emphasized at every turn the Russification of Moldova in the 19th century. Meanwhile, Moldova’s absorption into the Romanian kingdom after WWI is treated as a boon for development and culture. As far as I know that’s probably true, well, as long as you weren’t Jewish, or Gagauz, or Bulgarian, or Ukrainian, or Russian. As far as the museum is concerned, those minorities didn’t exist.

Speaking of minorities, it only struck me after leaving the museum that there was only a small exhibit in the religion room that displayed a Torah and some other Jewish paraphernalia. One would never know that at the turn of the twentieth century, Jews made up nearly half of the population of Chisinau and other towns in the region. The museum is likewise silent on the subject of the fascist Romanian government’s participation in the Holocaust.

The museum did a better job of covering World War II. Since people who lived in Moldova fought on both sides of the war, the museum’s exhibits display paraphernalia from Moldovan soldiers from both sides. This seemed to me the classiest way this controversial subject could be approached. The victims of Stalinist repression are also remembered in the exhibits. Unfortunately for me, there’s not much from the Soviet period, but there are a lot of nice pictures of the tree-lined streets of historic Chisinau from various periods. (There's a Facebook page that has many old pictures of Chisinau here.)

Overall, the museum’s main sins were those of omission. The exhibits were well-presented, but it reflected the unfortunate attitude that you find in so many countries that history belongs to the majority nationality and who cares about the rest. Nevertheless, I’m glad they’ve managed to keep these museums open at all so that I can have the chance to to take a brief tour through Moldovan history for 40 cents. The next time I go to Chisinau, I’m definitely going to check out the ethnographic museum.