On a museum exhibition “The Universe of Calendars”

In the end of 2010 the National Museum of Archaeology and History of Moldova opened the exhibition “The Universe of Calendars”. It was a retrospective review of about 50 calendars published in Russia and Romania from the second half of 19th century to 1940s. Most of the items have never been exhibited. Organizers of the exhibition did not intend to display the museum collection of calendars in the whole. For the exhibition there were selected the best examples, and the most valuable of them are the Novorossiysky Calendar for 1852, Calendru anticu for 1863, the Calendar for All for 1870, the Illustrated Address Calendar of the Bessarabian Province for 1913 and some others. The exhibition presented to the visitors a calendar as a kind of publication, focusing on the calendars in book form. At the same time, it was an attempt of a scientific approach to the study of calendars that allowed seeing in them not only a historical material, but also a cultural phenomenon.