📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Saturday 3 October
If you have ever walked past the grand main building of Sofia University and wondered who the two bronze gentlemen out front are, today is their day, or at least one of theirs. Plenty of us would guess kings or generals. They are bankers, and part of their fortune came through Manchester.
What happened on this day
Evlogi Georgiev (ev-LO-gee) was born in Karlovo on 3 October 1819. He studied under Rayno Popovich in his home town and then in Plovdiv, taught for a while, and in 1837 left for Galați, on the Danube in what is now Romania, where his mother's brothers, Hristo and Nikola Puliev, ran a rice-trading firm. On 1 March 1839 the three of them signed a partnership: the uncles put in 68,000 and 50,000 groshes, young Evlogi 27,000. His brother Hristo soon joined him. They started with rice, grain and Samokov iron, and by the early 1850s were working with a Greek firm in Manchester, Theologo, importing English yarn, cloth, iron, sugar, spices, coffee and rum. Then they discovered the quieter money in interest, discounts and exchange rates. By 1872, 90 per cent of their income came from banking, and between 1839 and 1878 the firm's capital grew more than 95-fold, most of it belonging to the Georgiev brothers. Bulgarian Wikipedia calls Evlogi the richest Bulgarian merchant and banker of the late 19th century.
He spent about 60 years abroad, mostly in Bucharest, and his relationship with the new Bulgarian state was, shall we say, complicated. Elected to the first ordinary National Assembly in 1879, he saw Stefan Stambolov challenge his seat over his citizenship; elected again in 1880, he was thrown out outright for holding Russian citizenship. It did not stop him. In 1896 he gave the state 800,000 for a university building plus a 10,134-square-metre plot in central Sofia, and when he died in 1897 his will left six million more for a higher school "chiefly of the positive sciences applied to industry". The government then sued his executor, Ivan Evstratiev Geshov, alleging the will had been falsified. It lost. The Paris law professors advising Geshov, Marcel Planiol and André Weiss, asked how such madness from a government was even possible. The building itself took decades: the foundation stone was laid on 30 June 1924 and the main building consecrated on 16 December 1934, with Kiril Shivarov's bronze figures of the two brothers set before the façade.
Why this matters for British expats
Think of the Victorian industrialists whose fortunes built Britain's redbrick universities, and you have Evlogi Georgiev, with the added twist that his money partly came through Manchester. Sofia University is the oldest institution of higher education in Bulgaria, and its most recognisable building was paid for by a man the young state tried twice to keep out of its parliament. If you live in Shumen, our own university is a much younger cousin. One more detail worth knowing before you raise a glass to him: the revolutionary poet Hristo Botev was a relative on his mother's side, and despite years of hardship in Romania, never once asked the brothers for money. His own line in the will is the best epitaph going: "Only the hope that I too may share in the prosperity and greatness of my fatherland lets me die at peace." For how money works here now, rather more modestly, see our money guide.
Sources and further reading
Bulgarian Wikipedia's entry on Evlogi Georgiev is the place for the numbers, the will and the long court fight over it. Wikipedia's pages on Sofia University, in both English and Bulgarian, tell the story of the building his money made possible, down to the sculptor behind the brothers' statues.