Sorry to hear it, Neo, especially considering you obviously liked the instrument and were having fun playing it.  It is a beauty, too.

What I would worry a bit about though, is that your local climate may be dry enough in the cold season that when you get a new violin, you may run into similar troubles with it.  You might want to get a hygrometer, which is an instrument for measuring humidity in the air.  Fancy ones can be expensive, but small simple ones are not.  The ones I use, I paid about 3$ USD for, I think.  I don't recall exactly, since I bought several of them at once, but they weren't expensive.  Pic below.  Oh, and that humidity that it is reading is not what I use for instruments, that is the one out of the bathroom where someone took a shower a little bit ago.

FM would know better than I about what a violin might need for humidity, but I do have wood instruments that are held together by hide glue and have varnish finishes.  I have never had one get damp enough to have the glue come apart, but mold and mildew would be definite hazards if an instrument was kept too damp. 

So what humidity is good?  Well, the expert opinions seem to vary quite a bit on that.  But what I think is a key is that they will sound a bit different with changes in humidity.  If the humidity goes out of the range of about 40-65%, I start getting nervous, though.   I have some instruments that sound great at 60%, not so good at 50%.  Others like a bit more or less.  How do you get less?  Well, unless humidity was very high, I usually wouldn't.  But sometimes when I've worked on other people's instruments that had gotten soaked due to carelessness, plumbing disasters or flood, I have put it into a closet with a basement de-humidifier.  That is basically a bucket full of silica stuff that absorbs water out of the air.  But it can make the air very dry in the closet and that wouldn't be good for anything like long term storage.  That's more of an emergency measure.

Humidity here can go quite high in the summer sometimes, 85-90% once in a while.  Then I take the humidifiers out of cases, and leave cases open.  But that is more worrying about mold or mildew.  I haven't had any damage that I have seen over the years from too much humidity, but I may have just been lucky, too. 

Again, I don't know the specifics or what acoustic violins need or prefer so far as humidity.  I do own one instrument in particular that is probably even more finicky, though.  My oud is made of several different woods and has a bit of inlay work on it.  Anyplace where there is a join, especially between two different woods or mother of pearl and etc, there can be an increased chance of cracking or separation if humidity or temperature vary too much.  This one likes it at just about 60% and when the weather is very cold and dry I sometimes have to re-wet the sponge I keep in it's case almost every day.

The pic of the pegbox is just to give nightmares to the folks that worry about having to peg tune just 4 strings.  Try 12.  LOL

Well, if you *want* a bow and don't want to put the bucks into getting one right now, you could always make one.

 Here's a couple articles where making a bow is part of the instructions. 

http://api.ning.com/files/-HbA.....Fiddle.pdf

The first one takes a bit of work, the second one is dead easy, just a bit of stiff wire and some thread.  No rosin?  Well, if there is any sort of evergreen that oozes a bit of sap in your area, you could try a mostly dried bit of that, or hard beeswax can also sorta work. 

Great quality?  Nah!  But something to use when you get sick of plucking the strings?  Possible.  They work, sorta.  Not as good a sound as even a freebie Chinese bow, but they're something.  I made both types of bows a couple months ago, and gave them to a friend after I'd messed with them a little.

The point I'm trying to make is: If you're going to play, don't let anything stop you.

suresh:  I will see if I can make up something to play on oud that I can use as a backing or duet track for a recording with violin perhaps.  Mostly I showed the pic as an example of another complex and finicky acoustic instrument with a lot of hide glue and varnish that a humidifier made with just a sponge and a plastic sandwich bag has kept in good condition with no problems for a few years now, even through harsh and dry winter weather.