Moldovan ethnographer, curator says 2020 year mostly period of internalized feelings

Chisinau, 6 February /MOLDPRES/ - The 2020 year was a special one for the ethnographer, curator, PhD in philology, university lecturer, scientific researcher Varvara Buzila.   

”This was more a period of internalized feelings, of reconsiderations and recoveries, than one of truly new achievements. It has proved that there are also other ways of living,’’ Buzila said.  

Contacted by MOLDPRES, Varvara Buzila said that the 2020 year had imposed people to think about the live as about a supreme value. She made works which had been postponed for years in a row. During more than 35 years, she has accumulated notes in researches on ground, recordings with various bearers of traditional culture, sketches of ethnographic objects, photos, negatives, reveals of history and culture monuments – in general, quite useful sources for the knowledge and reasoning of the cultural processes in the Moldovan geographic space.      

Varvara Buzila was born in the Trebujeni village, central Orhei district, on 19 November 1955. She studied at the Journalism Faculty of the Moldovan State University (1975-1980). Buzila maintained her doctor’s degree in philology, folklore specialty, at the Babeș-Bolyai University from Cluj-Napoca, Romania, in 1998. She started the activity of curator at the Chisinau-based National Ethnography and Natural History Museum in 1983, where she worked as scientific secretary during 2006-2019 and scientific researcher coordinator starting from 2020.     

Varvara Buzila participated in the elaboration of the Law of Museums (2002), elaboration of the law on the protection of intangible cultural heritage and the law on the protection of the mobile cultural heritage (2010-2011). On the period 2009-2019, she acted as head of the National Commission for Safeguarding the Intangible Cultural Heritage and as of 2020 – member of this Commission. Starting from 2009 till present, Buzila has been member of the National Commission for Heraldry under the President of Moldova. Also, Varvara Buzila took part in the scientific substantiation and working out of the files of candidate to the UNESCO’s representative list of the intangible cultural heritage of the humanity: Singing carols by groups of men (2009-2011), registered along with Romania in 2013, Cultural practices associated to the Day of 1 March, submitted along with Romania, Bulgaria and Macedonia, recorded in the same list in 2015, Traditional techniques of making wall carpets in Romania and Moldova, registered in the same list in 2016 and the Art of shirt with drawings and ornaments – identity element in Romania and Moldova (research 2016-2020), for registration in 2021.      

Varvara Buzila is also author of books on culture and history subjects. She published over 50 scientific works, more than 100 articles on popularizing science. In 2009, Buzila was awarded the honorific title, Merited Man and the Labour Glory order in 2015.