Moldovan History Competition Unleashed Great Creativity
Great creativity and enthusiasm: This year’s Moldovan competition topic “Dialogue Between Generations After 30 Years of Independence“ encouraged young students to take a look at the past and its legacies from a new, personal perspective: They identified people and life stories describing childhood and school years in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. They collected and analysed documents from personal or institutional archives, elaborated on the historical period and compared experiences and life stories in the Soviet Moldova and in the Republic of Moldova after the Independence.
Competition organiser Aliona Badiur from DVV International Moldova emphasises: “The young researchers paid attention to some important aspects: they identified the characteristics of the historical context, shared personal perceptions of the interviewed protagonists and their own considerations, compared seemingly symmetrical realities in the two mentioned periods. In their researches they used various sources: testimonies, epoch pictures, archival documents, museum relics and interviews. They discovered fragments of the period in the actions of people in their home town or place of residence, and outlined the destinies of apparently ordinary people who had an impressive career.”
130 participants submitted a total of 105 individual and group entries. They were supported by 41 teachers from various regions of Moldova.
Some of the participants compared the media of the late Soviet Union with current publications. Others focused on school life, e.g. on different attitudes of teachers towards pupils. Individual lifestyle in families, but also the Moldovan Declaration of Independence of 1991 played a role, including the facets of the transition to the Latin alphabet, national values, and linguistic revival. Other entries dealt with different ideologies over time, comparing Leninist indoctrination with democratic pluralism.
The jury identified 15 winners who shared the grand prize and 1st to 3rd places. Besides, 31 distinction certificates and 84 participation diplomas were awarded. On 18 June 2022, the official Moldovan “Historian Day”, the winners were awarded at the State Pedagogical University "Ion Creanga" in Chișinău. During the ceremony, Goets Ortmann, representative of the Cultural Section of the German Embassy in Chișinău, Ludmila Armasu-Cantir, vice rector of the State Pedagogical University, Angela Cutasevici, vice mayor of Chișinău, as well as various experts of contemporary history honored the prize winners’ efforts and valuable contributions. Katja Fausser, EUSTORY Programme Director, congratulated via video message on behalf of Körber-Stiftung and the EUSTORY Network.
Since 2017, the Moldovan History Competition is organised by the National Association of Young Historians of Moldova (ANTIM) and DVV International Moldova with the financial support of the German Federal Foreign Office.