List of Famous people born in Plovdiv region, Bulgaria
Miro
Miroslav Barnyashev is a Bulgarian-American professional wrestler. He is currently signed to All Elite Wrestling (AEW), where he performs under the ring name Miro and is a one-time AEW TNT Champion. He is also known for his decade-long career in WWE under the ring name Rusev, where he became the first and so far only Bulgarian wrestler to have worked for WWE.
Samuel Finzi
Samuel Finzi is a Bulgarian actor, of Bulgarian-Jewish descent. Since his start in the late 1980s, he has hundreds of film, television, and theatrical credits. Between 1993 and 2011, he received ten acting awards.
Tsvetana Pironkova
Tsvetana Kirilova Pironkova is a Bulgarian professional tennis player. Considered to be one of the best grass court players of her generation, she has been noted for her "cerebral" skills on the surface. Pironkova also found success playing on the quick hard-courts throughout her career, winning a title in Sydney and reaching the quarterfinals of the US Open.
Sonya Yoncheva
Sonya Yoncheva is a Bulgarian operatic soprano.
Hristo Stoichkov
Hristo Stoichkov Stoichkov is a Bulgarian former professional footballer who is currently a football commentator for Univision Deportes. A prolific forward, he is regarded as one of the best players of his generation and is widely considered the greatest Bulgarian footballer of all time. He was runner-up for the FIFA World Player of the Year award in 1992 and 1994, and received the Ballon d'Or in 1994. In 2004, Stoichkov was named by Pelé in the FIFA 100 list of the world's greatest living players.
Madelaine Böhme
Madelaine Böhme is a German palaeontologist and professor of palaeoclimatology at the University of Tübingen.
Nevriye Yılmaz
Nevriye Yılmaz is a Turkish retired professional female basketball player of Galatasaray. Yılmaz, who grew up in Bulgaria in a Turkish family, moved to İstanbul, Turkey with her parents when she was nine years old.
Stefka Kostadinova
Stefka Georgieva Kostadinova is a Bulgarian retired athlete who competed in the high jump. Her world record of 2.09 metres has stood since 1987. She was the 1996 Olympic champion, a twice World champion and five-times a World Indoor champion. She has been the president of the Bulgarian Olympic Committee since 2005.
Solomon Passy
Solomon Isaac Passy is a Bulgarian scientist, politician, and innovator, founder and President of the Atlantic Club of Bulgaria, Foreign Minister in the Government of Simeon Sakskoburggotski (2001-2005), Chairman-in-Office of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in 2004. He represented Bulgaria at UN Security Council and was its Chairman, and was nominated by Bulgaria for Secretary General of NATO (2009).
Christo Grozev
Christo Grozev is a Bulgarian investigative journalist, media expert and media investor, the lead Russia investigator with Bellingcat, focusing on security threats, extraterritorial clandestine operations, and the weaponization of information. His investigations into the identity of the suspects in the 2018 Novichok agent poisonings in the UK earned him and his team the European Press Prize for Investigative Journalism. Grozev is known for using open-source, social media, other available data for investigations. Based in Vienna, Austria, he authored investigations identifying, among others, two senior Russian officers linked to the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in 2014, GRU officers involved with the 2016 Montenegrin coup plot, the three poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal suspects in 2018 and poisoning of Alexei Navalny in 2020.