On Saturday, Bulgaria laid to rest the remains of Tsar Samuel in the Basilica of St. Sofia, more than a thousand years after his death. The ceremony closed a diplomatic process that began in the 1970s. It also opened a new chapter in an older argument: who Samuel was, what his state was, and why his bones matter so much to three countries.
A state that refused to die
Samuel’s story begins with a collapse. In 971, Byzantine Emperor John I Tzimiskes captured Preslav, the capital of the First Bulgarian Kingdom, after driving out the Kievan Rus who had occupied it. Tsar Boris II was taken to Constantinople and stripped of his regalia. Byzantium considered Bulgaria finished.
It wasn’t. The western lands, centred on Macedonia, were never conquered. There, four brothers known as the Komitopuli, the sons of a provincial governor, Count (Komit) Nikola, took up the fight. David, Moses, Aron and Samuel launched an uprising around 976, after Tzimiskes died.
The brothers did not last long. David was killed by wandering Vlachs and Moses fell besieging Serres. Aron was executed on Samuel’s orders along with most of his family, reportedly for negotiating with the Byzantines. Historians still disagree on whether this happened in 976 or 987. Only one of Aron’s sons, Ivan Vladislav, was spared. That decision would come back to haunt the dynasty.
For years Samuel led the state as its military commander, while Roman, a son of the former Tsar Peter, held the title of tsar. Only after Roman died in Byzantine captivity was Samuel crowned, around 997.
Glory
The high point came in August 986. Emperor Basil II besieged Sofia, then known as Sredets, and failed to take it. On his way back, Samuel’s army ambushed him at the pass known as Trajan’s Gate. The imperial army was routed and Basil barely escaped. It was one of the worst defeats of his reign, and it shaped everything that followed.
Over the next decade Samuel rebuilt and expanded the state, from the Adriatic coast to Thessaly. He took Larissa after a long siege and moved the relics of its patron, St. Achillius, to an island in Lesser Prespa Lake. There he built a monumental basilica that became the seat of the Bulgarian patriarchate. His raids reached as far as the Peloponnese.
The long decline
Around 997, at the river Spercheios in central Greece, Samuel’s army was surprised by the Byzantine general Nikephoros Ouranos and slaughtered. Samuel and his son Gavril Radomir survived, wounded, by hiding among the dead. Archaeologists believe a badly healed fracture on the left forearm of the skeleton now in Sofia may date from that night.
From 1001, Basil returned almost every year with a methodical campaign. Pliska and Preslav fell, then Vidin after an eight-month siege, then Skopje. Samuel kept fighting for another 13 years, without regaining the initiative.
The end came at Kleidion, in the Belasitsa mountains, on 29 July 1014. Basil’s forces broke through Bulgarian fortifications and captured a large part of Samuel’s army. According to the Byzantine chronicler John Skylitzes, Basil ordered 14,000 or 15,000 prisoners blinded, leaving one man in every hundred with one eye to lead the rest home. When Samuel saw them arrive at Prespa, he collapsed. He died on 6 October 1014.
A story worth questioning
The blinding is the most famous episode of Bulgarian medieval history and one of the least verified. Skylitzes wrote decades after the events. Michael Psellos, an earlier historian who covered Basil’s reign, does not mention it. Many historians consider the numbers inflated, given the logistics of blinding and moving thousands of prisoners across mountain terrain. Even Basil’s famous nickname, Bulgaroktonos or “Bulgar-Slayer,” only appears in sources more than a century and a half after his death. A brutal act may well have happened. Its scale likely grew with the legend.
The fall
Samuel’s death broke the state. In 1015, Gavril Radomir was murdered by his cousin Ivan Vladislav, the boy Samuel had spared. Ivan Vladislav reigned three years and left the Bitola inscription, in which he describes himself as Bulgarian by birth. He died besieging Dyrrhachium, modern Durrës, in early 1018. Weeks later his widow, Tsaritsa Maria, surrendered to Basil in Ohrid. The First Bulgarian Kingdom was over.
The bones
Greek archaeologist Nikolaos Moutsopoulos began excavating the Basilica of St. Achillius in 1965. In 1969 his team uncovered graves in the most honoured part of the church. One held the skeleton of a man of around 70, about 160 centimetres tall, with a crooked left forearm and a head wound, buried in remains of fine clothing and armour. Moutsopoulos attributed it to Samuel. Two nearby graves held remains he linked to Gavril Radomir and other members of the family.
The identification has its critics, mostly in Greece, who argue that the burial style and clothing point to later Byzantine elites. Bulgarian medievalists Dr. Konstantin Golev of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and Prof. Pavlov, speaking on the Bulgarian History podcast before the ceremony, said they have little doubt. They point to the location inside Samuel’s own patriarchal cathedral, the war injuries consistent with sources, and a grave protected for centuries by an arched niche that looters mistook for rock. According to Greek media, more recent anthropological and protein analyses also support the attribution.
Golev nevertheless warned that the remains should have been tested in full, including DNA, before reburial. Genetic analysis cannot prove the skeleton is Samuel’s, but it can show whether the men in the neighbouring graves were close relatives. Once the bones lie in St. Sofia, he noted, the identification becomes the position of the Bulgarian state.
Significance
Bulgaria has a peculiar problem for a country with 13 centuries of statehood: it has almost no identified remains of its rulers or national heroes. Attributions for Khan Kubrat and Tsar Kaloyan remain disputed. The graves of Vasil Levski and Hristo Botev are unknown. Samuel now becomes the first medieval Bulgarian ruler whose burial place can be pointed to with reasonable confidence.
For North Macedonia, where Samuel is central to national historiography, the transfer is a blow. The joint Bulgarian-Macedonian historical commission had agreed that Samuel ruled a state most historians consider Bulgarian. Yet Skopje’s official reaction stressed defending Macedonian identity, and parts of its media called the ceremony a spectacle.
Samuel’s life, with its revival, brilliant victories, family bloodshed and collapse, has long been read as a mirror of Bulgarian history. His remains have finally come home. The arguments about him have not ended with the burial.