Hagi Prodan House, the 18th-19th Century Merchant's House Museum, Ploiești

Hagi Prodan House stands at Strada Democrației no. 2 in central Ploiești and houses the „Casă de târgoveț din secolele al XVIII-lea - al XIX-lea” (Merchant's House of the 18th-19th Centuries) museum, a branch of the Prahova County Museum of History and Archaeology. The building dates from around 1785 and is considered the oldest in the city. It is a merchant's house with a porch on posts and a cellar, and its floral stucco decoration dates from 1825-1830. The house is named after Ivan Hagi Prodan, a merchant from Bulgaria, a coppersmith and head of the coppersmiths' guild, who lived here with his wife Marița, who had received the house as her dowry. In 1819 Hagi Prodan made a pilgrimage to the Holy Places and brought back religious objects, including a large icon on canvas known as „Ierusalim”. After the First World War the building was restored on the initiative of Nicolae Iorga and became the first museum in Ploiești. It was damaged by the 1944 bombing raids and later restored, and the Hagi Prodan house museum was officially opened on 1 May 1953. From 1985 it hosted an exhibition dedicated to the poet Nichita Stănescu, and the present museum opened on 18 May 2005 after a further restoration. The rooms are furnished as the home of a merchant family: a room with a divan, a mother-of-pearl inlaid table and a long pipe, a salon with a 19th-century Florentine table and a period ceiling, a bedroom with icons, and a kitchen with baklava trays, a sand tray for coffee and Transylvanian pottery. The porch has 11 posts, nine of them original. The building is a listed historic monument, LMI code PH-II-m-A-16255. The museum is run by the Prahova County Museum of History and Archaeology under Prahova County Council and is open to visitors.