Friedrich GRUNANGER, the son of a weaver, was born in 1856 in Siebenburgen, Hungary, part of Romania today. He studied in Vienna at the Higher Technical School, and then at the Friedrich von Schmidt Academy of Fine Arts. In 1879 he was invited to Bulgaria by the Directorate of Public Buildings to assist in the construction of a palace for Prince Alexander I in Ruse (which was completed in 1886 and is now the Regional History Museum).

From 1884 until his retirement in 1908, he worked as a chief architect at the Ministry of Public Buildings, Roads and Public Works and was the court architect of Prince Ferdinand I. In 1911, after a stay in Salzburg, he came back to Sofia and worked there as the ChiefArchitect of the Euphoria “Evlogi and Hristo Georgievi” until the outbreak ofthe First World War.

His buildings in Bulgaria are numerous. Between 1883 and 1885 he built a men’s high school with a boarding school, is now a polytechnic high school for foreign languages. Between 1880 and 1894, a boarding school for teachers (now the City Hall. In Sofia he built between 1894 and 1895 the additional northeast wing of the palace of Prince Ferdinand I. Some of his other constructions there are the Orthodox seminary and the church “St. Ivan Rilski ”, built between 1912 and 1914, the building of the National Social Security Association “Balkan ” between 1994 and 1905, the Orthodox Theological Academy between 1904 and 1908, and the Central Synagogue between 1904 and 1909, as well as most of the great synagogue on the Balkan Peninsula.

In addition to the above, he designed numerous residential buildings and villas, such as the house of Haralampi Sarmadjiev in Sofia, (built in 1903) that is now the residence of the Turkish Ambassador, and between 1906 and 1907, the house of Dimitar Jablansk and later, in 1993, the Chinese Embassy. In Salzburg between 1909 and 1910 he built a house for himself and his wife.

Apart from the Balkan National Insurance Company (that was partially destroyed during a bombing in 1944 and was replaced by a newer building in 1949), all the buildings mentioned so far were preserved. In 2002, the ground floor of the house of Ivan Evstratiev Geshov at 16 Tsar Osvoboditel Blvd. was demolished and an office building, based on to the arcjtrctural plans of the Viennese architect Wilhelm Holzbauer (born 1930), replaced it. Grunanger died in 1929 in Salzburg.