Kolyu Ficheto

Biography

There is a story told about the Byala Bridge. The client, an Ottoman pasha, received a promise from Kolyu Ficheto that he would keep to a sum three times smaller than other contractors had asked, and that otherwise the master would put himself in the pasha’s power. These words are carved on his monument in Veliko Tarnovo. I have seen no documents confirming the conversation itself; it is a tradition.

Nikola Fichev was born in 1800 in Dryanovo (then Direnova, Ottoman Empire). His father died when he was three. He began learning his trade in Tryavna: by some accounts at the age of ten, by others at five. At about seventeen (by other accounts, fourteen) he was taught stonecutting by masters of the western Bulgarian building school in Görice, now Korçë in Albania. He then learned to build churches, bell towers and bridges from masters in Bratsigovo. At twenty-three he became a journeyman, and at thirty-six the guild recognised him as a full master.

He could not read or write. He did, however, speak Turkish fluently and Greek and Romanian reasonably well. The Turkish honorific “usta” (master) stayed with him for life.

In 1837–1840 he worked with the Bratsigovo team of builders in Thrace, in Adrianople and in Istanbul, where, it is believed, he mastered the methods of Revival architecture and the Baroque that had come from Italy and Dalmatia. He then returned to Tarnovo and in the 1850s and 1860s built many of his finest buildings there. Among them are the House with the Monkey (1848), the inn of Hadji Nikoli, the Church of Saints Cyril and Methodius (1861), and the bell towers of the Transfiguration Monastery (1861) and the Plakovo Monastery (1865). For his native Dryanovo he built the Church of St Nicholas and a bridge over the Dryanovo river (1861). In Svishtov, in 1865–1867, came the Church of the Holy Trinity, regarded as an outstanding example of Revival architecture. Around 1856 he met Midhat Pasha and became his adviser on building matters. For the Byala Bridge over the Yantra (1865–1867) he was chosen over a qualified foreign engineer. Felix Kanitz called this bridge one of the most beautiful and monumental structures in the Balkans of its day. For the bridge the master, it is reported, received the Order of the Medjidie, 50 piastres and a plot of land in Tarnovo.

Contemporaries and later writers note his light constructions and characteristic details: small columns, oriel windows, and stone reliefs with folk motifs, that is, nymphs, griffins, lions and eagles. There is also the “Ficheto mare”, a particular form of supporting element, about which I do not feel able to say more.

Even in old age, in the 1870s, he took on his largest commissions: the konak (the Ottoman administration building) in Veliko Tarnovo (1873–1874) and the Covered Bridge over the Osam in Lovech (1872–1874). It is said that during the testing of one of his bridges he lay beneath it to show his confidence in his calculations.

After the Liberation, the liberation of Bulgaria from Ottoman rule, Fichev was appointed city architect of Veliko Tarnovo, where he carried out building inspections and supervision. He died in 1881 in Tarnovo and was buried there. Today his grave is in Druzhba Park, and the original cross is kept in the Konaka historical museum. His grandson was the Bulgarian general Ivan Fichev.