School-facade mosaic, Haragîș
A Soviet-era mosaic on the facade of the school in Haragîș, a village in the Cantemir district of southern Moldova, about 20 km from the town of Cantemir and 89 km from Chișinău (roughly 815 inhabitants at the 2014 census, almost entirely Moldovan). As in many villages of the Moldavian SSR, public buildings — houses of culture, shops and especially schools — were given monumental mosaic panels in the 1960s–1980s, a widespread decorative genre that tied official Soviet art to everyday village life. The mosaic on the Haragîș school belongs to this wave but remains anonymous: neither its artist, year, nor subject is recorded anywhere. The work is listed in the „Mosaics of Moldova” (Buretz) inventory, where it was photographed by Irina Roșca, but no openly-licensed photograph of the mosaic exists, so its imagery cannot be described from a verified source. (Not to be confused with the modern village memorial to the Iași SMURD crew who died when their helicopter crashed near Haragîș in 2016 — an entirely different work, unrelated to this mosaic.)
- Track
- Southern Moldova
- Neighborhood
- Haragîș, r. Cantemir
- Building
- Școala din Haragîș, r. Cantemir