The honorary chairman of MRF Ahmed Dogan has bought from the businessman and former chairman of BSP – Plovdiv Georgi Gergov the emblematic for the city restaurant “Puldin” in the Old Town.
In April 2021, the Hermes Foundation, chaired by Dogan, bought the historic building, a monument of Ottoman architecture. The deal is carried out through a specially created company with the mysteriously chosen name “RUMI-1207”. It was founded on April 2 as a subsidiary of Gergov’s company “Old Plovdiv”, which contributes the entire capital of BGN 827 thousand. However, the headquarters of the new company is at the headquarters of the MRF in Sofia – 45A Alexander Stamboliyski Blvd. And Birshen Ibryamova, Renginar Mutalib and Nina Petrova-Kashkina were elected members of the board of directors, writes “Capital”.
Birshen Ibryamova has been working as Dogan’s secretary for many years. She is married to the movement’s MP Ceyhan Ibryamov and is currently on the board of the Hermes Foundation, and is also chairman of the Liberal Integration party foundation. Renginar Mutalib is a MRF financier who signs as the compiler of his reports, as well as those of the foundations. Nina Petrova-Kashkina is the executive director of Delta Epsilon, the company that owns Dogan’s Boyana barn.
Shortly after the company registered on April 13, another of Gergov’s companies, EAG Invest, transferred the restaurant to RUMI-1207. The material interest in registering the deal is nearly BGN 780,000. On April 28, the shares of the new company together with the property were endorsed by Gergov to the new owner – the Hermes Foundation. In addition to Dogan and Ibryamova, her management also includes longtime MRF MP Kamen Kostadinov. The documents in the Commercial Register do not show the price of the transaction and whether it coincides with that of the transfer two weeks earlier. It is also unknown how the Hermes Foundation financed the purchase, as in previous years its assets and annual income from donations were much more modest.
The restaurant complex “Puldin” consists of three buildings located on a plot of 1.4 decares on 3 Knyaz Tseretelev Street. It is one of the few surviving monuments of Ottoman architecture in Old Plovdiv. It is located on the northern slope of Jambaz Tepe, a hundred meters from the Ancient Theater.
In the past, the building known as Mevlevi Khane was a dervish monastery, for which the earliest evidence is from the 16th century. It included a prayer house-mosque, a hall for ritual dances of the dancing or revolving mevlevi and residential buildings for the dervishes. He believes that before that in the Middle Ages there was a Christian monastery. At the end of the 19th century, after the Liberation, the site was abandoned. The mosque collapsed during the earthquake in 1928 and only the large ritual dance hall survived from the former complex. A rich interior decoration of wood carvings and frescoes with influence from the Bulgarian Revival style is also preserved.
Under the building passes part of the former wall of the acropolis, discovered during archeological excavations in the 70s of the XIX century. The finds can be seen in an underground hall created for the purpose, located under the yard of the complex.
The complex has been restored and converted into a restaurant, which opened in 1974 under the name “Puldin”. Gergov acquired it in 1999, when 80% of the state-owned company Staraya Plovdiv was sold to the Marsa company, registered in Hissarya, in a dubious deal for $ 3.1 million. Its owner is the local literature teacher Dimitar Sotirov. Soon after, the state’s share was reduced to almost zero, and Gergov’s companies officially became the property. The restaurant was temporarily closed and reopened after renovation in 2001.
According to its own statutes, the Hermes Foundation has the main goals of building and restoring schools, kindergartens, community centers and spiritual temples, awarding scholarships in the field of education, as well as stimulating gifted children. “We intend to use the site for cultural events and perhaps as a restaurant. We plan to make investments for renovation,” Birshen Ibryamova commented.
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