Exhibition of Romanian traditional costumes inaugurated at Chisinau-based museum

Chisinau, 26 April /MOLDPRES/ - An exhibition titled, Matrix of the Romanian Soul, Traditional Holiday Costumes of Diana Toma’s Collection, today was inaugurated at the National Ethnography and Natural History Museum from Chisinau.  
In the beginning of the event, the museum’s director, Petru Vicol, said that the exhibition displays 58 traditional holiday costumes from the 19th-20th centuries, coming from the provinces Muntenia, Oltenia, Banat, Transylvania and Moldova and is dedicated to the Centenary of Bessarabia’s Union with Romania. “The owner of the costumes, Diana Toma from Buzau city, Romania, during more than two years, has been collecting specimens of traditional costumes, as she is sure of the need to save and promote this heritage of the ancestors. The exhibition anticipates the events occasioned by the National Day of Traditional Costume, annually marked in Moldova on the last Sunday of June,” Vicol noted. 
Attending the event, Romanian Ambassador to Moldova Daniel Ionita said that these costumes prove that beauty is eternal and universal. In the context, the collector of the costumes said that she had come on her with a costume similar to the one of Queen Mary of Romania, preserved in collections of the Romanian Peasant Museum from Bucharest. “I felt that I wanted to know what is beyond the signs sewed on linen and thus I started this fabulous adventure to the matrix of the soul of the Romanian peasant woman,” Diana Toma said.     
A programme of folk and patriotic songs was performed in the end of the exhibition’s inauguration.  
The exhibition will be open till 30 June.
(Reporter N. Roibu, editor M. Jantovan)