Pencho Georgiev

In the spring of 1940 the National Theatre in Sofia was preparing Salammbô, and the man designing its sets was Pencho Georgiev, one of the busiest stage designers in the country. On the 2nd of April, working over the machinery below the stage, he fell into an open elevator shaft and was killed. He was 40.

He had come up from Vratsa, a town in northwest Bulgaria, where his father had died in the Balkan Wars. After the First World War he went to Sofia and finished the Academy of Fine Arts in 1925, in the applied and decorative class of Stefan Badzhov. Almost at once he found the theatre, designing his first production, Tchaikovsky's Queen of Spades, for the Sofia Opera, and then some 30 more sets for drama, opera and ballet.

A state scholarship took him to Paris at the end of the 1920s, where he trained under the French decorator Paul Laurent and cut woodcuts and etchings. Back home he became the first person in Bulgaria to illustrate the novels of Maxim Gorky, the Russian writer, and he drew for children's books too. His theatre designs were shown at the Milan Triennial of 1936, four years before the accident under the stage.