EditA sarcophagus of Macedonian marble for the tsar of the Bulgarians
Bulgaria received the remains of its tsar, Greece received 48 relics, and North Macedonia received one more reason to argue about the past
Tsar Samuel no longer divides Bulgaria and Greece, but he still stands between Bulgaria and North Macedonia.
A thousand years after his wars with Byzantium, and six decades after his grave was found, the Greek state will hand his bones to Bulgaria — as the remains of a Bulgarian ruler. While Sofia and Athens close an old dispute over relics from the past against a backdrop of ever closer cooperation in energy and transport, Sofia and Skopje still have different stories about the dead tsar.
A deal unthinkable in the 20th century
Behind Athens’s gesture, however, lies not only a reconciliation with history, but a very concrete exchange. In return for the remains of Samuel, his son Gavril Radomir and other members of the royal family, Bulgaria will hand Greece 48 relics taken from Greek monasteries during the First World War.
In the Bulgarian government’s official announcement, this is described with the diplomatic formula “reciprocal transfer for safekeeping.”
Thus each of the two states will receive what it considers its own. Bulgaria – one of the few remaining material traces of its medieval statehood; Greece – the return of cultural artefacts.
Such an exchange would have been hard to imagine in the 20th century, when Bulgaria and Greece fought each other, argued over territory, and after the Second World War found themselves on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain. Today, besides belonging to the same alliances – the EU and NATO – they are bound by shared interests: from the gas interconnector and liquefied-gas terminals to transport corridors and energy connectivity.
On 3 October, Sofia and Athens will close the deal. The Bulgarian government plans to turn the reception of Tsar Samuel’s bones into a nationwide celebration. His remains will be laid in a marble sarcophagus in the church of St Sophia. Metres from it, in 2015, a six-metre monument to the ruler was erected to mark the millennium of his death.
Who takes the credit
The identification of the remains as belonging to the Bulgarian king Samuel were made by a Greek scholar on Greek territory. In 1965, the Greek professor Nikolaos Moutsopoulos found four graves during excavations at the Basilica of St Achilleios on the island of the same name in Little Prespa Lake. From the location, the burial context and the anthropological data, he identified one of the skeletons as the remains of Tsar Samuel. After 1965 his remains were kept by the Greek authorities in Thessaloniki.
The Bulgarian authorities’ efforts to bring his remains to Bulgaria have had mixed success. Only in 2022 – when, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Athens became an important partner for Sofia because of energy security – did the question reach the highest political level. Former prime minister Kiril Petkov says that it was in 2022 that his Greek counterpart, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, gave him a commitment that the remains would be handed over.
Four years later it has happened, under a different Bulgarian government. “For six decades the efforts of the Bulgarian state to return the mortal remains of one of its greatest rulers have never ceased. It has fallen to us to have the historic honour of achieving it,” said Prime Minister Rumen Radev.
And Skopje?
Sofia and Athens found a way to agree on Samuel. Between Sofia and Skopje it is more complicated.
The dispute begins with the name itself. “Samuel’s state” is a later historiographical term. For most contemporary medievalists, Samuel ruled the Bulgarian Empire, even though its political centre was no longer in Preslav but far to the south-west – around Prespa and Ohrid. At different times his power extended over a large part of the Balkans – territories that today fall within Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Greece, Albania, Serbia, Kosovo and Montenegro.
It is precisely the geography that is one of the arguments of the Macedonian historical narrative: Ohrid, one of the main political and ecclesiastical centres of Samuel’s state, is today in North Macedonia.
In 2019 Sofia and Skopje did manage to find a common formula. The joint historical commission recommended that the two states celebrate Tsar Samuel together. When the agreement was published in 2022, the then co-chair of the commission on the Macedonian side, Dragi Gjorgiev, stressed that it had not dealt with the ruler’s identity. The two sides agreed on a joint commemoration, but not on how Samuel’s state should be presented in textbooks.
Meanwhile the historical dispute has already moved far beyond the textbooks. In 2020 Bulgaria blocked the start of North Macedonia’s EU accession talks over disagreements that included history, language and the implementation of the Treaty on Good Neighbourliness.
Two years later Sofia lifted the veto after the so-called French proposal, which Skopje also accepted. One of the agreed conditions is that Bulgarians be written into the constitution of North Macedonia before the first negotiating cluster is opened. The change has still not been made, and the VMRO-DPMNE government of Prime Minister Hristijan Mickoski refuses to accept it on the agreed terms.
Now Samuel’s bones have put history back in the news.
While the government in Skopje has so far not commented on the transfer of the remains, some Macedonian media and historians have already read it as a move aimed at North Macedonia.
The historian Stojko Stojkov even cast doubt on the identification of the bones and said that Sofia and Athens would use their transfer as “propaganda against Macedonia.” Mitko Panov, a member of the joint historical commission, was more restrained. In his view, moving the remains is a contemporary political act and cannot serve as proof of the character of Samuel’s state.
Other outlets focused on the deal itself. Nezavisen, Libertas and Telma led with the exchange — the bones in return for 48 ecclesiastical and cultural objects. The sharpest headlines also carried Samuel into domestic Macedonian politics. Večer recalled former prime minister Zoran Zaev with the headline: “If it had been Zaev, he would have given them the fortress in Ohrid as well.”
The former SDSM prime minister Zoran Zaev has already stood in tribute before Tsar Samuel in Sofia. In 2017, the day after the Treaty of Friendship was signed, Boyko Borissov took the Macedonian prime minister to the monument of the ruler. The two laid flowers beneath the inscription “tsar of Bulgaria.”
Nine years later, Samuel’s bones are coming to Sofia. North Macedonia is still waiting to open its first negotiating cluster with the EU.
And here history allows itself one last irony. Samuel’s remains will be brought to Bulgaria and laid in a sarcophagus of white marble quarried near Prilep — in North Macedonia.
Caption: The sarcophagus in which Samuel’s mortal remains will be laid [BNT]
Updated: October 1, 2026 - 05:43
