Vezhdi Rashidov

Biography

Until the seventh grade Vezhdi Rashidov lived and studied in an orphanage in the village of Studen Kladenets. His mother was the well-known singer Kadrie Lyatifova.

He was born on 14 December 1951 in Dimitrovgrad, into a family of Turkish origin. At the age of two his parents took him to Haskovo. His father worked as a miner in Madan. After the orphanage Rashidov applied to the secondary art school in Sofia but failed the entrance examination. His father sent him to Madan, to a technical school for mining electrical engineering. A year later he was admitted to the art school in Sofia after all, and he later graduated from the National Academy of Art in Sofia; by some accounts this was in 1978.

His professional career moved quickly. In 1978 he received a sculpture prize at an international symposium in Burgas and a prize at the National Art Exhibition in Pleven. In 1981 he was awarded the Vatican's gold medal named for Dante Alighieri, in 1983 first prize at the Gabrovo Biennial of Humour and Satire, and in 1987 a silver medal at the first World Triennial of Portrait Sculpture in Gdańsk. In 1989 the Union of Bulgarian Artists gave him its grand annual prize named for Marko Markov. He has shown work abroad since 1981; he is also reported to have exhibited at Art Basel (1984) and to have worked since 1993 with a Paris gallery. His exhibitions have been held in Paris, Warsaw, Kraków, London, Moscow, Yerevan, Istanbul, Amsterdam and Tokyo. By 2006, the thirtieth year of his professional work, he had held more than forty exhibitions in Bulgaria and abroad.

His statuettes are given as awards: the Golden Rose prize of the Bulgarian Film Festival in Varna, the Sirak Skitnik prize of Bulgarian National Radio, the Pythagoras prize of the Ministry of Education and Science, and the Police Officer of the Year prize of the Ministry of the Interior. A separate part of his work is made up of dynamic drawings, most often in watercolour.

In the late 1980s he donated 60,000 dollars toward the rebuilding of Spitak after the earthquake of 7 December 1988, and was made an honorary citizen of Armenia.

Rashidov has been prominent in public life since the 1990s. At the celebration of his forty-fifth birthday in December 1996, Ilia Pavlov, the owner of the company Multigroup, jokingly gave him the title “Chief Multak of the Republic of Bulgaria”; the recording was shown on national television. On 29 November 2001, outside the Sofia municipality building, where Rashidov was a municipal councillor, a conflict broke out with a police officer over an improperly parked car, and the officer's nose was broken. Rashidov and his colleague Emil Dodov were detained the next day, but in April 2002 the prosecutor's office dropped the case. Rashidov denied his part in the fight. In May 2002, for his fiftieth birthday, President Georgi Parvanov presented him with the Order of Stara Planina, first class.

In 2009 he headed the list of the GERB party in Kardzhali, although he is himself of Turkish origin and has repeatedly criticised the Movement for Rights and Freedoms, traditionally strong in that region. He was elected to the 41st National Assembly, and on 27 July 2009 became Minister of Culture in Boyko Borisov's first government. He took the post again in 2014 and remained minister until 2017. In 2015 he organised an exhibition of Bulgarian Thracian treasures at the Louvre; Bulgaria paid the costs, and in Sofia this caused controversy, among other things over journalists' travel expenses and a fee paid to choir singers. In 2016 an open letter in which Rashidov said that the journalist Georgi Angelov was “in a state nursery” provoked public discontent and calls for his resignation; he did not resign. That same year he awarded the honorary badge “Golden Age” to Dimitar Ivanov, a former head of a department of the State Security service.

Rashidov was elected a deputy to the 41st, 42nd, 43rd, 44th, 45th and 48th National Assemblies, and chaired the culture committee of the 44th. He received the Austrian Golden Cross of St Leopold in 2016, an honorary doctorate from the University of Library Studies and Information Technologies in 2006, and in 2004 became a corresponding member of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. He is an honorary citizen of Kardzhali, Madan and Dimitrovgrad. In 2021 he opened a gallery bearing his name.

In 2022 he opened the 48th National Assembly as the oldest of the elected deputies. The Assembly failed to elect a speaker on 19 and 20 October, and on 21 October Rashidov was chosen: 139 deputies voted for him, 73 against, and 27 abstained. He held the post until 2023. On 8 August 2023, after a sharp remark he made in parliament about protests against domestic violence, he resigned the same day as chairman of the culture committee and from GERB, and the next day gave up his seat as a deputy.