Hindliyan House

An Armenian merchant's house painted inside with the cities he traded in, and a marble bathroom fed by its own hypocaust.

Built in 1835 for Stepan Hindliyan, an Armenian merchant whose business ran from Plovdiv to India, this is the most decorated interior in the Old Town. Almost every wall surface is painted: floral panels, trompe-l'œil niches, and a series of cityscapes of the trading ports he dealt with. Nothing is subtle and all of it is original, which separates it from its reconstructed neighbours.

The detail people remember is the bathroom — a domed marble room with its own hypocaust heating and a skylight of coloured glass, built into a private house in a provincial Ottoman city in the 1830s. There is also a rose-water fountain in the entrance hall, still plumbed.

It is a two-minute walk from Balabanov House and the same combined ticket covers both. Allow half an hour; the house is small and the pleasure is in looking closely rather than walking far.

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The murals in the reception rooms are painted views of the places Stepan Hindliyan traded with — Constantinople, Venice, Alexandria, Lisbon — done by craftsmen who had mostly never seen them and worked from the merchant's descriptions. They are wrong in ways that are more interesting than accuracy would have been.

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