bg Haskovo

Stoycho Marchev House

- Ploshtad Svoboda 19 -
The two-story building was built around 1903 for the residential and commercial needs of the Bulgarian merchant, industrialist, and philanthropist, Stoycho Marchev. He was born on June 1, 1879, in Haskovo, and his poor eyesight, which his parents initially ignored, brought him failure at school. He has to repeat the classes, and his father's serious illness forces him to interrupt his studies and start working in the family's shop and oil mill, although his father wanted him to study at the Robert College in . At his father's factory, he learned the intricacies of the production of vegetable oils. In 1903 he got married to Kitsa Sotirova and soon after his marriage he separated from his father and built his oil workshop and his own house with office. Stoycho Marchev wants to keep up with technical progress. In the new workshop, he introduced a two-shift mode of work and subsequently ordered a motor and a hydraulic press from England. He is assisted in his work by his wife, who is far-sighted, honest, thrifty, and hard-working, and thanks to whom their business generates large profits, which are invested in the purchase of land and real estate.
Stoycho in his office and his wife Kitsa on the far left
Kitsa and Stoycho did not have children of their own, but they helped hundreds of other children by funding homes for orphans and the needy. They support many charitable endeavors in the city and help to build an orphanage in the yard of the . On April 8, 1938, 5 years before his death, Stoycho Marchev appeared before a notary in Haskovo and publicly made his colossal bequest to the Haskovo municipality. He left real estate, built and unbuilt in the center of Haskovo with the aim of building, furnishing, and managing a Technical Crafts School, the kind that existed only in Kazanlak at the time, which would bear his name and that of his wife, and one of the rooms to be turned into a family museum. The house of Stoycho and Kitsa Marchev was destroyed around 1970, and until then, it was used as a building of the Technical Crafts School.
Stoycho and Kitsa Marchev seated in front of items donated to the church
The building was built in the styles of Eclectic and Neo-Baroque and featured a top gable that was beautifully decorated. It was topped with a segmental and contained a pointed pediment, as well as several and globes. The balcony door that was placed within the top gable led to a small balcony, which was secured with a curved cast iron railing. The two that supported the balcony, was in addition to even more volutes, also embellished with three . The frames around the second floor windows were also adorned with guttae, as well as some ornament that was adorned with floral decorations. The , as well as the , were lavishly decorated with all sorts of geometric forms.
The building shown on the right in the 1960s before its destruction