he photos of the elderly man with a beard reproduced above are familiar to many Bulgarians, who recognize 98-year-old Dobri Dobrev as a fixture on the streets of Sofia, where he regularly begs for money. What many didn't know until fairly recently was that Dobrev wasn't begging for himself: he has lived off his monthly government pension and some assistance provided by others, while donating all the money he had collected (estimated at about 40,000 euros) to help cover the costs of restoring decaying Bulgarian monasteries and churches and paying the utility bills of orphanages.
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