University Archive

Fund Prof. Lyuben Prashkov

He was born on July 18, 1931 in the village of Polski Senovets, Veliko Turnovo Province. He graduated from high school in 1949, and in 1957 he graduated from the Sofia Art Academy. As a student he became interested in the problems of technique in painting, which predetermined his furthre.

His professional conservation and restoration work dates back to 1959, when he began working as a restoration artist. In 1961, he opened a studio for the conservation of wall paintings and organized the cleaning of murals and other monuments of Bulgarian Medieval culture.

Between 1960 and 1962 he specialized in the conservation and restoration of painting in USSR and Poland. Between 1962 and 1967 he was a doctoral student at Moscow University, working on his dissertation on the topic "Materials and Techniques of Bulgarian Monumental Painting From the End of the XII to the End of the Fourteenth Century". He graduated as a "Restoration Painter First Category" and in 1967. In the same year, he joined the Rila Monastery National Museum as a research associate.

From the 1969 he taught painting techniques at the Sofia Academy of Arts. The following year, he specializes thanks to UNESCO scholarship, visiting France, Italy and Spain. In 1972, he participated in the team that created a copy of the Thracian Tomb in the Bulgarian town of Kazanlak. In 1973 his first book, the "Hrelyova Tower. History, Architecture, Painting " was published. In 1974 Luben Prashkov was appointed as Associate Professor, and in 1981 he became a Full Professor. In 1992 he was appointed as a Director of the specialty "Iconography" at the Orthodox Theological Faculty of Veliko Turnovo University. From 1996 to 2007 he taught in various courses in the Department of History of Culture and the Department of Tourism at New Bulgarian University.

Prof. Dr. Lyuben Prashkov died on March 18 2007 in Sofia.



The archive of Prof. Dr. Lyuben Prashkov was donated to the University Archive in 2007 from his family. The documents in his archive represent Prof. Prashkov as a restoration artist, an art critic, a teacher.

There are also plenty of autobiographical materials in his personal archive fund.

His personal fund contains manuscripts and worksheets for the creation of many published articles over the course of his life. An important part of the archive are numerous handwritten notes, reflecting the scientific observations of Lyuben Prashkov.

A number of documents shows the work of Prof. Prashkov as a conservation expert. Photo documents have a special status in his archive. There are a lot of photos, negatives, positives, and slides of monasteries, churches, murals, iconostases. There also photographs tracing the stages of the restoration process of Prof. Prashkov.