CONSTANTIN STERE MUSEUM

The museum opened in 2005 for the 140th anniversary of the birth of the intellectual and politician Constantin Stere, defender of the cause of the Romanians of Bessarabia. Constantin Stere or Sterea (1865-1936) is also known by his pen name "Şărcăleanu". He was born in June 1865, at Horodişte, to a noble family from Ciripcău. Stere attended high school at Chişinău where he became a young man with a revolutionary spirit, a lover of justice, equality and democratic freedoms. An anti-tsarist, he was arrested in 1884. On his release he settled in Bendery, then Odessa, where he was arrested again in 1886 and deported to Siberia. After six years of exile, he moved to Romania, became professor of administrative and constitutional law at the University of Iaşi, and served as rector from 1913 to 1916.

He formed a circle of intellectuals gathered around the question of the development of the working class and its affirmation in the political and social life of the country. The working class was for him a powerful engine for progress and social development. The worker-peasant alliance was, according to him, the basis for liberation from all forms of exploitation. A patriot, he was an actor in the union of Bessarabia with Romania in 1918. He is the author of the partly autobiographical novel Preajma Revolutiei ("On the Eve of the Revolution") and the magazine Romanian Life. This small museum is charming and recreates the atmosphere of Constantin Stere's daily life. In 2015 a bronze bust was inaugurated in the courtyard of the museum.