Petru Costin Gallery – Ialoveni – Moldova

This gallery in a small town just on the edge of Chișinău (full official name Galeria colecțiilor Petru Costin a consiliului raional Ialoveni) is a strange place.

Housed in what was a school for special needs children before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 this four story ‘museum’ is certainly unique. Petru Costin was a Romanian Customs Official and hoarder. He collected anything and everything from Moldova during the Socialist period – together with some earlier religious works.

It’s not really curated in the sense you would expect in a ‘normal’ museum which makes visiting some of the rooms overwhelming. There’s little in the way of description of most of the articles and missing dates on some items makes if difficult to recognise any development in the technology, for example, in the electrical equipment rooms.

Although there are items related to the decoration and propaganda produced in the Soviet Union, for example, many hundreds of enamel badges in one of the first floor rooms – but surprisingly no badges of VI Lenin (unless I missed them in the general chaos) – those especially interested in such material have to wait until you are taken to the very last room on the ground floor.

This would have originally have been the school’s assembly hall and is the largest single room in the building. It’s packed with statues, busts, paintings, banners, pendants and general ‘memorabilia’ from the Soviet era. Although there has been some element of organisation of the material there is so much, and so little space, that the curator just seems to have eventually given up.

That’s a shame. We know that all museums have much more material than they have on public display (I read recently an article where the V and A Museum in London is trying to make more of its collection ‘in storage’ available to the general public) but the decision in this gallery is to make everything available on show – even if it means it’s difficult to properly see and appreciate what’s there. I suppose the only solution would be more space – but that would provide its own problems.

Most museums have so much to see that you end up missing some of the most interesting items – not seeing the wood for the trees. And that’s even more the case here.

I didn’t even make a start on counting the images of VI Lenin, both in statuary and in other forms. JV Stalin makes a number of appearances followed, in number, by images of FE Dzerzhinsky, I understand both Lenin and Stalin and I can appreciate the role ‘Iron Felix’ played in the early defence of the Revolution but I have never been able to work out exactly why (amongst some of the other important Bolshevik leaders of the 1920s and 30s) he seemed to be so respected by so many of the Soviet population – even into the Revisionist period.

The slide show below aims to pick out some detail from the chaos – perhaps a second visit might be warranted to discover what I might have missed the first time.

How to get there;

Trolleybus No 36 (destination Ialoveni) heading south-east down Boulevard Stefan cel Mare in Chișinău will take you within a few minutes walk of the gallery. Get off just before the roundabout at the bottom of the very long hill. Be careful if you return to Chișinău on the no. 36. The second half of the return route is completely different from the outward and you end up close to the Triumphal Arch by the back way.

Cost is 10 leu (6 leu for Chișinău and 4 leu for Ialoveni).

The matrushka No. 35, from the Central Bus Station, will also take you there.

Website – in Romanian only;

A companion piece to the internal gallery (and well worth the effort of visiting) is the Petru Costin Open Air Museum (see the separate page on this blog for what is on display there) but this is not easy if you are dependent on public transport. One of the best options is to talk to (the English speaking) Natalia at the Gallery. She can arrange for one of the local volunteers (or a local taxi driver) to take you there, wait whilst you walk around the site and bring you back to Ialoveni. Cost around 400 leu/€20.

Museum of Socialist Art – Sofia

Museum of Socialist Art – Sofia, Bulgaria

The Museum is in two parts; the internal gallery and the garden with the collection of statues (almost certainly the most interesting part of the site). The internal gallery has an exhibition that might change. I don’t know how regularly. When I visited in April 2024 there was an exhibition of cartoons, both pro-Socialist and (mostly) anti.

The sculpture garden doesn’t seem to change, There’s probably much more in store than is possible to put on display. And some of the sculptures may not have been designed to deal with outside conditions and will never be put on show if not in the internal gallery.

Sculpture Garden – 01

In the garden you will find;

some fine (and sometimes very large) statues/busts of Comrade VI Lenin. There seems (to my non-expert eye) to be a ‘chunkiness’ – no doubt not an artistic term – to Balkan statues, especially when compared with what would have been produced at the same time in the Soviet Union. As an illustration of that see the two version of JV Stalin in the (now closed, as far as I know) ‘sculpture park’ at the rear of the National Art Gallery in Tirana, Albania;

a number of busts and full length statues of GM Dimitrov. I’ve nothing to compare them to but they also demonstrate that solidity of Balkan sculpture;

a couple of very fine busts of Felix Dzerzhinsky (‘Iron Felix’), the first leader of what started out as the Cheka (and which eventually became the KGB), the organisation Comrade Stalin described as ‘the bared sword of the working class’. For reasons which I admire, but don’t totally understand, Iron Felix was admired throughout the Socialist world, probably due to his steadfast defence of the interests of the working class and peasantry – even though his personal background was that of a minor Polish aristocrat. However, the image of Iron Felix closest to the entrance of the garden is erroneously signed as being VI Lenin. How so called ‘curators’ can allow that error to go unchallenged just goes to show the depths to which education has gone in capitalist Bulgaria;

Sculpture Garden – 02

some quite delicate and beautiful images of female co-operative/collective farm workers;

a number of statues which celebrate/commemorate the struggle of the Partisans against the Nazis in the Great Patriotic War. There’s one that reminds me of a number of groups of Albanian lapidars and another which, with its religious reference to a trinity and the deposition from the cross, with Paskali’s statue in the Martyrs Cemetery in Permet;

a bust of Che Guevara;

a very gentle and moving statue of two Korean children being subjected to the carpet bombing of the ‘United Nations’ (read the US and its lackeys) armed forces during the Victorious Fatherland National Liberation War of the early 1950s. The older boy has his left arm in a sling and he his sheltering his younger sister with his right arm – something that will be happening all the time in Gaza now and which Socialist Bulgaria would have been condemning as opposed to slavishly supporting as a member of NATO;

a couple of group sculptures whose original orientation can present a different idea once that orientation is altered;

a strangely androgynous representation of ‘The Republic’ which has the body of a female but the facial features of a male;

but no ‘Uncle Joe’. Joe and Georgi were like two peas in a pod but after the revisionists took control in the Soviet Union, all the other countries of Eastern Europe (apart from Albania) quickly followed and any statues of JV Stalin would have been taken down in the 1960s. I’m sure they must still exist somewhere. Perhaps one day they will emerge from the darkness;

Sculpture Garden – 03

also (which I almost missed) those statures not considered worth anything, left in a back yard, just left to decay, one even showing how the statues were given their bulk and weight – through its sacrifice of destruction – including a rare ‘classic’ nude female;

and a number of statues that can only have been considered unacceptable due to the sculptor and not the content – unless I missed something.

There’s obviously a lot more Socialist realist artworks still in storage somewhere in Sofia. In recent years the internal art gallery hosted a selection of paintings of the Socialist leaders and also another exhibition of those Socialist Realist paintings that celebrated the working class and peasantry. There were a couple of catalogues of these exhibitions available in the book stall of the National Art Gallery.

The principal aspect of the Monument to the Soviet Army, which used to stand on the top of the pedestal and which was removed in December 2023, is supposed to be coming to this gallery at some time in the future. Whether the delay is political or if the statue is undergoing restoration and cleaning I don’t know. This consists of a trio, a Red army solder, a Bulgarian woman holding her baby, and a Bulgarian man. However, I see at least three problems with this installation in the museum garden.

The first is that something that was designed to be seen from more than 30 metres below will look very strange at ground level. Secondly, I can see very serious problems on getting such a structure physically through the entrance to the museum garden. Even if it is in three parts it will be a major logistical task to lower the statue into position. Thirdly, where would it go? There’s not a lot of space available.

How to get there:

Get to GM Dimitrov Metro station on the lines 1 and 4. After leaving the station and getting to street level follow the ‘tunnel’ of the Metro heading to the city centre. On the opposite side of the road is the office of Fibank. At the first road junction (still within sight of the Metro station) turn right. Within a few metres there’s a modern shopping/cafe complex on the right and immediately after this you’ll see an entrance controlled by a barrier. Go through this into a car park and you’ll notice a large red star amongst the shrubbery to your right. The entrance to the museum statue park is to the left of the star. The ticket office is in the small souvenir shop on the left.