The first public database dedicated to the centralization of child protection institutions that operated in socialist Romania and in the first post-communist decade.
𝐇𝐀𝐑𝐓𝐀 𝐀𝐁𝐀𝐍𝐃𝐎𝐍𝐔𝐋𝐔𝐈 [Abandonment Map] was born out of an emergency. More than 30 years after the fall of the communist regime, the number of children who lived in the protection system is still unknown.
𝐇𝐀𝐑𝐓𝐀 𝐀𝐁𝐀𝐍𝐃𝐎𝐍𝐔𝐋𝐔𝐈 responds to a need for memorial and historical recovery of the phenomenon of the institutionalization of children during the communist period and was built according to rigorous archival criteria, with photographic or written documents, discovered in unknown, personal and institutional archives, which at the moment do not exist in the public space.
In the pilot stage, which we are launching in November 2023, 100 of the 770 institutions we have discovered in all Romanian counties will be active on the Abandonment Map, with over 550 associated images. In the next year, after research and processing, the entire archive that the MA team has been working on for almost two years will be gradually uploaded to www.muzeulabandonului.ro. This archive brings together a tangible and intangible heritage of abandonment histories, made up of over 20,000 photographs, documents, objects, and testimonies.
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