- Most of Soviet Moldova’s signed mosaics go back to fewer than ten artists, working from the 1960s to the end of the Soviet Union.
- Mikhail Burya and Vladislav Obukh made a dozen mosaics together, most of them on buildings by the architect Valentin Mednek.
- The artists made the designs, and craftsmen like Boris Ivashko laid more than 120 of them across the republic.
Cosmic Plowmen: The Mosaicists of Moldova
An overview of the main mosaic artists of Soviet-era Moldova: Mikhail Burya, the Obukhs, Aurel David, Aleksandr Kuzmin and others, with their key works.
Aurel David’s Plowman of the Universe (1972), made in his revolutionary broken-glass technique due to the absence of smalt in Moldova.
Most of the signed mosaics in the Concrete Wastelands archive go back to fewer than ten people. Two of them, Mikhail Burya and Vladislav Obukh, account for a dozen works between 1963 and 1975, most of them in Bender and Chișinău. The rest is a mix of painters who took on the occasional wall and names that appear on one panel and nowhere else that we’re aware of.
The artist Alexei Colîbneac, a student of Aurel David, dates the movement to the 1960s, when Soviet mosaic was classed as monumental art and treated as part of propaganda. As in most places outside Moscow, monumentalists worked on mosaics in Moldova from the mid-to-late 1960s until the fall of the USSR in 1991. Local historians and journalists count around forty surviving mosaics in Chișinău. The source material is almost entirely in Russian. Romanian sources cover the artists with a reputation in painting or graphics, but rarely their monumental work. English coverage is mostly travel blogs that photograph the panels and copy the credits.
Mikhail Burya and Vladislav Obukh
Mikhail Burya (Михаил Афанасьевич Буря) was born in 1924 in Lozova, in Ukraine's Kharkiv region, and was made an Honored Art Worker of the MSSR. A 2025 survey of Chișinău's mosaics names him first among the leading artists of the Moldovan mosaic movement, and no one in this article made more.
Vladislav Obukh (Владислав Андреевич Обух) was born in Leningrad on December 5, 1928, and graduated in monumental-decorative painting from the Mukhina school in 1953. He came to Moldova the same year, chaired the board of the Moldovan Union of Artists from 1965 to 1972, and left in 1990.
The pair's first joint commission appears to be the Tkachenko House of Culture in Bender (Bendery), 1963, with ceramic mosaic on its side projections. A 2023 Transnistrian heritage almanac calls it the first ceramic mosaic used in Moldova. The architect was Valentin Mednek, Bender's chief architect, who worked with them again and again.
The same team went on to the Bender bus station, with a triptych of Old Bendery, Red Square and New Bendery in 1967. In 1969 came the memorial and monument to the Fighters for Soviet Power, again with Mednek.
In Chișinău, Burya made Hospitable Moldova for the railway station in 1967, and the mosaic on the Moldtelecom building in the late 1960s with the ceramist Nicolae Coțofan. In 1971 he made Moldova for the House of Culture in Rîbnița (Rybnitsa).
The 1987 register of monuments for northern Moldova lists the mosaics then considered worth protecting there, and singles out the Bălți bus station and the Glodeni department store as the best. Both are by the same team as Bender.
- Bălți bus station, 1972: two works by Vladislav Obukh, the mosaic relief Greeting on the facade and the mosaic panel Roads inside.
- Glodeni trade complex, 1972: Mikhail Burya's smalt panel Let There Always Be Sunshine! on the end wall, again on a building by Valentin Mednek.
- Briceni, 1973: a mosaic on the 50 Years of the Komsomol cinema by I. Lenchik and Vladimir Novikov.
- Burlănești House of Culture, 1979: Obukh's Victory on the facade.
Two Burya panels have already left their walls. Art, a smalt panel made in 1971 for the Palace of Trade Unions, was taken down, conserved and reopened at the Opera on December 16, 2022. The Legend of Chișinău (1973) was dismantled when its five-storey building was demolished in 2021, to be put up again somewhere else.
Pavel Obukh
Pavel Obukh (Павел Владиславович Обух) is Vladislav's son, born in Leningrad in 1952. He graduated from the Mukhina school in 1977 and worked in Chișinău through the Artists' Fund until 1994, on more than twenty facades and interiors. He worked mostly in hot encaustic and ceramic tile: a 96 m² encaustic in the State Circus foyer (1982), The Carpet of Life on the Carpet Combine (1984), and, with his father, Telegraph of the Revolution for the Ministry of Communications (1977). He lives in St. Petersburg.
He has two works in the archive so far. The first is The City is Flourishing and Being Built at Chișinău's central bus station, dated 1974 or 1975, which the artist Alexei Colîbneac, quoted in two press surveys, names as Pavel Obukh's work. The second is the mosaic on the former Iskozh Palace of Culture, made in 1978–82.
Aurel David
Aurel David (1935–1984) was a Chișinău painter, graphic artist and sculptor who also worked in mosaic and metal; he was awarded the State Prize posthumously in 1990. His Plowman of the Universe (1972) covers the Gagarin Youth Center, a building paid for with money young people earned on volunteer workdays between 1967 and 1972. Moldova had no tradition of Florentine smalt, so David invented his own technique, which he called erklez, using broken coloured glass. The Plowman is made that way. Without modern adhesives, most of his panels are now breaking down.
It has been called the Chișinău mosaic most in need of rescue, and is undoubtedly Moldova’s most famous monumental artwork.
He also made Electrification (1969), whose Lenin quotation has been defaced, and Winds-Waves on the House of Writers (1974). In Tiraspol he made the Tree of Life with Viktor Radovanov and Mikhail Rudenko.
Aleksandr Kuzmin
Aleksandr N. Kuzmin is named among the five leading mosaicists of Soviet Moldova. His name is still legible on Energy, the long panel on the CET-1 power plant; Michael Harrison, who found the signature, gives his birth as Kostroma, 1939.
His other works include Dance of the Muses in Valea Trandafirilor (1970), three panels for the Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning (1980) with the architect V. Bessonov, and The Awakening (1977), 110 m² of ceramic tile on the House of Culture in Mocra (Mokra), made with Ion Tăbîrță. Tăbîrță, born in Hlinaia in 1930, was a painter and engraver who taught at the Repin school, became chief painter of the Artists' Fund in 1977, and later directed the National Museum of Fine Arts (1983–88).
Filimon Hămuraru
Filimon Hămuraru worked in stage and film design, stained glass, mosaic and book graphics. The archive has his Labyrinth of Knowledge (1980) on the Gogol lyceum. He apparently did the backlit stained glass in the Palace of the Republic).
Gheorghii Hadjioglov
The last signed panels in the archive are in Cahul. Gheorghii Hadjioglov (also spelled Hadjalov) signed the five-panel mosaic on the Palace of Culture with his initials and the date, 1986, and the Sports School No. 1 panel with his full name and 1989. A source quoted by Michael Harrison says he came from Ukraine and was a member of the Union of Plastic Artists of Russia. The archive also credits him with the mosaic on the former Pioneers' Palace, undated.
Other credits in the archive are single panels, including Sport (1962–65) by Filipp Nutovich and Vladimir Novikov, and the TV Pavilion mosaic (1970) by Aaron Startman and Dimitri Iancu.
Boris Ivashko
The artists made the designs; others laid the tesserae. Boris Ivashko assembled more than 120 mosaics over two decades from sketches by Moldovan artists, in Cahul, Ungheni, Soroca, Bender and Chișinău. He worked with Burya, Pavel Obukh, Kuzmin and Vasile Nașcu. Of the panel on the Silk Combine kindergarten he remembers: "We made it in a month, and it counted for three. We started at five in the morning and finished at eleven at night." He is now collecting photographs of his panels as they are taken down.