Natural History Museum of Iași

The Natural History Museum of Iași stands at 16 Bulevardul Independenței in the city centre and is administered by Alexandru Ioan Cuza University. It was founded on 4 February 1834 on the initiative of a group of members of the Iași Society of Physicians and Naturalists led by Iacob Cihac, together with Gheorghe Asachi, Mihail Zotta, Constantin Sturdza and Costache Negri, and it is the first museum of this kind established in the Romanian Principalities. In 1840 the house of the boyar Costache Sturdza on Ulița Hagioaiei (today Bulevardul Independenței), known as Casa Roset, was bought for the museum, and the museum and the Society of Physicians and Naturalists still operate there. The neoclassical building, dated to the early nineteenth century, is one of the few in Iași with a ground floor vaulted on arches, and it is a historic monument, LMI code IS-II-m-B-03917. On the night of 3/15 January 1859, in one of the museum's halls, the deputies of the National Party decided to put forward Colonel Alexandru Ioan Cuza as candidate for the throne of Moldavia. The hall keeps period furniture and portraits of the founders and of naturalists who worked here, among them Grigore Cobălcescu, Anastasie Fătu and Petru Poni. In the courtyard, on the site of a small botanical garden laid out on the initiative of Cobălcescu and Fătu, two oaks declared natural monuments in 1973 survive. The collections number more than 300,000 specimens. The oldest item is Gaba, an Indian elephant bought in 1835 by Prince Mihail Sturdza and later donated to the museum, while Metropolitan Veniamin Costachi donated mammoth and woolly rhinoceros bones. The most valuable collections are those of insects (over 50,000 beetles), molluscs, spiders, amphibians, reptiles, birds (including nests and eggs), minerals and plants; the vertebrate collection exceeds 14,000 specimens, the palaeontology collection 10,000 and the mineral collection 2,900 samples. The building, owned by the City of Iași, has been under rehabilitation since 2019 in a project funded with European money. In early 2026 the museum was still closed to the public, with completion of the fitting-out scheduled for the end of 2026.