2022 marks the 160th anniversary of the birth of Dimitar Petrov Kudoglu, known as the biggest donor to Bulgarian healthcare. On this occasion, a special exhibition of 20 panels has been arranged at the eastern end of the Tsar Simeon garden in the centre of Plovdiv, the official opening of which will be on July .
The place was not chosen by chance - across from where the Central Post Office of Plovdiv stands today, there used to be the House of Charity and Public Health, created by Dimitar Kudoglu in 1927, so that the poor could be treated for free from the most dangerous diseases for society at that time - tuberculosis, venereal diseases and child mortality, specified by the Regional History Museum in Plovdiv.
Dimitar Petrov Kudoglu was born on August 21, 1862 in the Bulgarian village of Gabrovo, in the region of Aegean Thrace (Belomorska Trakia). He inherited the tobacco trade from his grandfather, multiplying the family wealth. After 1903, he moved to Dresden - one of the European centres for trade in raw tobacco.
Kudoğlu's charitable actions started at the beginning of the 20th century with the provision of a hospital building and the payment of a doctor to treat his fellow villagers in Gabrovo for free. After the burning of the village in 1913 by the Greek troops, he helped his fellow villagers who were now refugees in Plovdiv.
During the wars in the first decades of the 20th century his donations for soldiers, for free school canteens and the Red Cross exceed BGN 1,000,000. Later, he founded a fund at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in his name for the publication of literary works. He financed the university studies in Europe of gifted young Bulgarians, and accommodated talented violinist Nedyalka Simeonova in his home in Dresden.
The entrepreneur focused his philanthropic initiatives on health care, upholding the firm belief that in this way he could help create a physically and morally healthy future generation.
In 1927, Kudoglu materialized his idea of creating a dispensary-type health facility in Plovdiv, where the poor could be treated free of charge by the best Bulgarian doctors. By 1944, the funds donated by him for the hospital exceeded BGN 41,000,000. Undoubtedly, this is the largest donation for Bulgarian healthcare ever, and the health facility was admired by dozens of European newspapers and specialists.
Dimitar Kudoglu died in Plovdiv in 1940, and during the years of the Socialist regime in Bulgaria, his philanthropic legacy sank into oblivion, the Regional History Museum recalls.
English version Rositsa Petkova
Photos: Regional History Museum in Plovdiv, archive
Vasil Levski is a Bulgarian revolutionary and national hero who fought for the Liberation of Bulgaria from the Ottoman Empire. He is an ideologist, founder and organizer of the Internal Revolutionary Organization, for which grateful..
Bulgarian Patriarch Daniil will celebrate the first liturgy in London for the consecration of the new church of the Bulgarian Orthodox community in the British capital - the church of Saint Ivan Rilski. T he church is part of the Bulgarian Embassy..
Every year on February 10, the feast of St. Haralambos , Bishop of Magnesia, is celebrated with special solemnity in a small Bulgarian town in the northernmost part of the country's Black Sea coast . For Shabla and its residents, this is the..
The book "Icons from the National Church Historical and Archaeological Museum" - a huge work of over 500 pages, with more than 700 published photographs..
Clear
Mostly Cloudy
Partly Cloudy