bg Sofia

Metodi Todev House

- Ivaylo Street 24 -
The first floor of the residential building was built in 1915 for the public figure, journalist, and revolutionary, Lazar Popovski. He was born in 1891 in the village of Kosinets, then in the Ottoman Empire. His father is , a prominent enlightened activist, bishop's vicar in Kostur, and an activist of the Internal Macedonian-Edirne Revolutionary Organization (), and his brother is a major entrepreneur. Lazar participated in the and the as a volunteer, and was awarded the Order of Bravery. During the , he was the commander of a machine gun company and after the war, he was dismissed from the army and engaged in journalism. Between 1925 and 1927 he was military attache and secretary of the Bulgarian legation in , appointed at the request of General .

In 1927 he was dismissed from the embassy in Tirana. He emigrated and settled in Switzerland, where he worked as a correspondent in Albanian and French newspapers, after which he returned to Bulgaria in 1930. From 1933 he was the editor-in-chief of a left-wing newspaper, which was banned in 1941 because of its anti-German positions. He was interned consecutively in multiple concentration camps throughout Bulgaria. After the , he was appointed as a diplomatic representative in . In December 1949, while back in Bulgaria, he was arrested, interrogated, tortured, and died in prison in February 1952, at the age of 60.
Lazar Popovski sitting in the center of the photo
The upper floors of the building were built in 1925 for the Bulgarian tobacco merchant Metodi Todev. He was born in in 1882 and was married to Shina Todeva. Together they had three children, one of which was the actor Nikola Metodiev Todev. He was born on June 13, 1928, in in the Smolyan region. Nikola Todev graduated from the agricultural school in with a degree in Wines and Brandy. After 1946, when his father's property was confiscated as illegally enriched, he started acting. In 1952 he was an actor at the Smolyan Theater, and then at the Theater, where he met his wife, the actress Zlatina Gocheva Todeva. Both were later actors at the Plovdiv Drama Theater.
Nikola Metodiev Todev (right) and his wife Zlatina Gocheva Todeva (left)
The building, built in the Eclectic style, resembles a small castle with a beautiful as its main feature, which is crowned with an octagonal . The fragments underneath the dome are embellished with garland wreaths that are adorned with ribbons. The , which are located on the corners of the third floor are crowned with Tuscan . The dormers, which are placed within the mansard roof, are decorated with garlands. Above some of the windows, you'll be able to see garlands with two foliage, while above some others you'll see or a strip that is decorated with an motif. Right next to the turret there's a bay window with a sunroom on top of it. Above the , you'll see a protruded balcony, which is secured with a cast-iron railing.
An old photo of the building created somewhere in the 1970s