Regional History Museum - Comrat

The Regional History Museum of Comrat sits on ulița Lenin in the centre of the Gagauz capital, housed in a four-storey rendered block typical of Soviet civic architecture: flat-fronted, rectilinear, with minimal ornament. The museum itself predates the building's current civic incarnation. It began official activities in 1969, growing out of the House of Pioneers in Comrat, where children organised tourist clubs, collected local historical material and carried out small-scale archaeological work under the guidance of their leaders. The museum now holds over 70,000 exhibits covering Gagauz history from the 3rd and 4th centuries AD through to the present, including archaeological finds, traditional costumes, ethnographic displays, documents and photographs of the 19th and 20th centuries. Gagauzia is one of the more anomalous political entities in the former Soviet space: a Turkic-speaking Orthodox Christian autonomous region inside Moldova - one of the handful of Christian Turkic people in the world. The Gagauz migrated from Bulgaria and today maintain a distinct language, culture and limited self-governance. The museum is one of the primary institutions through which that identity is formally documented and transmitted.