Sofia welcomes Tsar Samuil’s remains a thousand years after his death

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Bulgaria received the remains of Tsar Samuil on Saturday with full state honours, closing a diplomatic effort that had lasted more than half a century.

The remains, long held at the Museum of Byzantine Culture in Thessaloniki, were handed over under an agreement signed this week by the culture ministers of Bulgaria and Greece. Prime Minister Rumen Radev attended the ceremony in Thessaloniki, hosted by Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis. The coffin was then flown to Sofia aboard a Bulgarian Air Force Spartan transport, escorted by MiG-29 and F-16 fighter jets.

At Knyaz Alexander I Square, a 21-gun salute was fired as the national anthem was played. A procession carried the coffin to the Basilica of St Sophia, where it was placed in a marble sarcophagus. President Iliana Iotova, National Assembly Chair Michaela Dotsova, Radev, ministers and other officials attended a memorial service led by Bulgarian Patriarch Daniil.

“Tsar Samuel returns to his people to remain in Bulgaria forever and to rest in this house of God,” the patriarch said. Radev thanked Mitsotakis and described the agreement as strengthening the strategic partnership between the two countries. Sofia Mayor Vasil Terziev called the return a major achievement for Bulgarian diplomacy and a fitting welcome in the city Samuil had defended more than a thousand years ago.

Samuil ruled the First Bulgarian Empire from 997 to 1014 and is remembered in Bulgaria as a national hero for his resistance to the Byzantine Empire. He died in 1014, shortly after the defeat at Kleidion. Greek archaeologist Nikolaos Moutsopoulos discovered remains identified as his in 1969, during excavations at the Basilica of St Achillios on an island in Small Prespa Lake, in what is now northern Greece. At the time of his burial, that territory lay within the Bulgarian realm. The bones were later kept in Thessaloniki.

Remains from two other sarcophagi at the same basilica, believed to belong to Tsar Gavril Radomir and other members of the royal family, were also transferred.

The handover is reciprocal. Under the memorandum, Greece is to receive about 50 religious objects removed to Bulgaria during the First World War and held at the National History Museum in Sofia. Both governments have presented the exchange as an act of mutual trust rather than a reopening of old disputes. Government and opposition figures in Sofia had urged Bulgarians to set political divisions aside for the ceremony.

A thousand years after his death, Tsar Samuil has returned to Bulgaria not because he ever truly left the land in which he was buried, but because that land is now Greek — and because Athens and Sofia chose an agreement over a quarrel.

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