A flag thought to have belonged to Stephen the Great, recovered by the Romanian state from the Zografu Monastery, in Greece, in 1917 and restored in the past seven years, will be on display, as of today, at the National Museum of Romanian History (MNIR). The flag will be on display throughout July, within the micro-exhibition series “Exhibit of the Month”. The exhibition opens today, at 11am, in the presence of the French ambassador, Henri Paul, and the Moldovan ambassador, Iurie Renita, as well as representatives of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.
The exhibit in question is a 15th-century Byzantine embroidery, which depicts Saint George, a symbol of military victory. The iconography and the dating of the piece led, initially, to the mistaken belief that it was a battle standard from Prince Stephen the Great’s day, but the absence of the Moldavian emblem, which is usually featured on military standards, contradicts this hypothesis.
In the spring of 1917, while Romania was at war, by the effort of the Romanian consul in Thessaloniki, G. C. Ionescu, and with the help of the French general Maurice Sarrail, the commander of the allied armies in Thessaloniki, the Kingdom of Romania managed to recover this precious artefact from the Zografu Monastery on Mount Athos.
According to the director of MNIR, Ernest Oberlander-Tarnoveanu, the flag was “in a deplorable state” when it was recovered and it remained so until it was restored by MNIR, for seven and a half years, on funds of several dozen thousands euros, allotted from the institution’s own budget. The standard was added to the MNIR collection on the founding of the museum, in 1970.
