“Ioan Neculce” bulletin – volume II/2020

A first conference and a new issue of the magazine

On August 28 and 29, 2020, the first Annual Conference of the “Queen Maria” Municipal Museum took place. The demonstration was organized with the support of the Iaşi City Hall and the Rotary Club of Iaşi and took place in the institution’s garden in Strada Zmeu.

Around the general theme, bearing the title: From the history of the city of Iași: people, places, institutions, 27 communications by recognized historians and archaeologists, young or at the age of academic maturity, were included in the conference program, who responded to the call launched by the organizers to bring together their scientific concerns in a dialogue intended to lead to the emergence, in the near future, of a new history of the city. The idea of ​​the conference started from the current observation of a state of mind comparable to that of the beginning of the 20th century, when N. A. Bogdan wrote about Iasi, but also to that of the 60s-70s, when the city experienced major urban changes, at an intense pace and in a short time. Those were the moments of the publication of valuable works on the history of the city, something that is possible to happen even today.

The outcome of the conference was encouraging, because during the two days the public was presented with the image of the latest research on the past of the city of Iaşi, on coordinates such as: The city and its people, where they talked about doctors from Iași, about libraries, readers and cultural personalities and political, like Teodor Codrescu or Nicolae Gane. The sub-theme The city and its elites continued as a deepening, a genealogical history of Iași being problematized, then going to the cathedral yard of the Metropolitanate of Moldavia, to look for the important people who were buried there and talking, further, about founders of churches and Iasi institutions and about people close to power, who, in the 19th century, despite the risk of losing their rank, wanted to be reformers of Moldovan society. In the group called The City and its hidden testimonies, the archaeological discoveries were brought to the surface and their role in the knowledge of the past of Iași was shown, the material evidence completing the documentary information. Institutions that were, such as those intended to prevent and fight fires or other natural disasters, hospitals, prisons or orphanages – were topics debated in another section, arousing the interest of the participants. So that, in the section entitled The City and its Pretences, the lecturers lead us from the 17th century to the communist period, showing us the metamorphoses that, in different eras, Iași experienced, from the point of view of human habitation , territorial expansion and urban structure, as a mixture of needs, aspirations, possibilities, up to the expression of administrative and political will in the way the city evolved and looked. The last section, called Varia: places, people, institutions, included apparently diverse, but not dissonant, interventions, from the questioning of the role that public monuments still have today, continuing with a presentation of the beginnings of cycling in Iasi and ending with two evocations of the activity of the “Regina Maria” Municipal Museum in the last period, through the acquisitions it made and the actions it organized.

The meeting being a success, due to the quality of the communications and discussions, most of the presented texts can be found in the current issue of the Ioan Neculce magazine. Bulletin of the “Regina Maria” Municipal Museum. Others were added to those, which were not found in the conference program, but are subscribed to the same concerns for the knowledge of the past of the city and its surroundings, following the program stated since the introduction of the first issue of the new series of the magazine.

The time has also come for a clarification that could not be made at the beginning of the first issue, namely that this is the third series of the “Ioan Neculce” periodical, claiming a succession that has its beginnings with the periodical of the first Municipal Museum of Iesian , appeared 100 years ago, but whose symbolic legacy was taken over, as early as 1995, by the revival of a publication called “Ioan Neculce. Bulletin of the Museum of History of Moldova”, a second series that ended up numbering XXIV volumes.

After the re-establishment of the Municipal Museum, it was discussed, in agreement with the Editorial Board of the History Museum of Moldova, within the Iasi National Museum Complex, the return of the magazine to its place of origin, by making a transfer, a takeover and returning to the name and the first purpose of the periodical, those formulated in 1921. Later, the agreement to transfer the “Ioan Neculce” series from the History Museum to the Municipal Museum was delayed, which is why the current series started last year with issue I. In in addition, compared to the institution established in 1920, the current Municipal Museum received, in 2019, the nickname of “Queen Maria”, which was also added to the name of the magazine, which means that now the original name is no longer followed exactly of the periodical, the new name being another argument for identifying it as a new series from an editorial tradition started a century ago.

Marius Chelcu