Konstantin Velichkov
1855–1907 · Bulgarian
The story
Konstantin Velichkov is remembered in Bulgaria first as a writer, the poet of the 'Constantinople Sonnets,' a memoirist of the failed 1876 uprising against Ottoman rule, and later a government minister of the young principality. He was sentenced to death for his part in that uprising and escaped it only when a European commission arrived to investigate the reprisals.
He belongs among painters for two reasons. He painted, in watercolor, mostly landscapes and scenes gathered on his travels through Constantinople and Italy, the same journeys that fed his verse. And as minister of education in 1896 he pushed through the opening of the State Drawing School in Sofia, the institution that grew into Bulgaria's Academy of Fine Arts.
He died in 1907 in Grenoble, in France, where he had gone to treat his failing health.
