"Tsar Samuel, known as the Armenian—King of the Bulgarians—returns home after a thousand years" by Carlo Coppola
More than a millennium after his death, and over sixty years after negotiations began, Tsar Samuel (997-1014), the legendary ruler of the First Bulgarian Empire, has finally found his definitive resting place in Sofia. The breakthrough came with a diplomatic agreement signed between Bulgaria and Greece on 29 September 2026. In exchange for the tsar's mortal remains and two other skeletons found in the same church, Sofia will return to Athens 48 sacred objects that Bulgarian troops removed from churches and monasteries in northern Greece during the First World War.
On 3 October 2026, the ruler's remains were flown from Thessaloniki to Sofia aboard a military aircraft, greeted in the skies by a fighter escort and on the ground by an honor guard and a 21-gun salute. The solemn procession, which set out from Alexander I of Battenberg Square and was followed by thousands of citizens, accompanied the coffin to the Basilica of Saint Sophia. There, the medieval king was laid to rest in the south nave, inside a monumental white marble sarcophagus 2.3 meters long.
To avoid international friction, the foreign diplomatic corps was not invited to the ceremony. Samuel remains a national symbol for Bulgaria, but he is also claimed by North Macedonia, a historiographical knot that fuels frequent political disputes in the region.
Samuel's story ended dramatically in the autumn of 1014. Defeated at the Battle of Kleidion by the Byzantine emperor Basil II (later nicknamed "the Bulgar-Slayer"), he died of a broken heart on 6 October, only a few months after seeing his army blinded on his adversary's orders.
He was buried in the Basilica of Saint Achillius on the island of Small Prespa, today Greek territory near the borders with Albania and North Macedonia. He had built this great church himself, after conquering Larissa, to house the relics of the patron saint.
His remains lay undisturbed for about nine centuries, until the archaeological discovery led by the Greek professor Nikolaos Moutsopoulos (historical sources vary between 1965 and 1969). In the south nave, the archaeologist uncovered four burials attributed to the Cometopuli dynasty. In the absence of inscriptions, the attribution to Samuel rests on a convergence of circumstantial evidence: the place of honor, the advanced age of the deceased, his height (about 1.60 m), fragments of a rich silk garment edged with gold and decorated with bird motifs, and a healed old fracture of the arm.
Without DNA analysis, the burial remains, strictly speaking, a solid archaeological hypothesis lacking absolute genetic confirmation. Until the repatriation in 2026, the skeleton was kept at the Museum of Byzantine Culture in Thessaloniki.
Beyond the Bulgarian and Macedonian interest, the affair has long attracted the attention of Armenian historiography. Since the studies of the historian Nicholas Adontz, a considerable school of scholarship has attributed Armenian origins to the Cometopuli of Bulgaria:
The maternal line: Samuel's mother, Ripsime (or Hripsime), is identified by several sources (including the Byzantine chronicler John Skylitzes) as the daughter of King Ashot II Bagratuni, thus linking the ruler to the prestigious Armenian royal dynasty of the Bagratids. A collateral clue lies in the biblical names of his four sons (David, Moses, Aaron, and Samuel), a custom widespread among the Armenian nobility of the time.
The 11th-century Armenian historian Stephen of Taron (Asoghik) advances an even more radical thesis: Samuel and his brothers were Armenian soldiers from the district of Derjan, sent by the Byzantine army to Thrace to fight the Bulgarians, but who later passed into the latter's service.
Although his father, Count Nicholas, is traditionally considered a local Bulgarian noble, some theories suggest an Armenian military origin for him. Anthropological reconstructions of the skull carried out in the 20th century highlighted features (such as an aquiline nose profile) recurrent among the peoples of the Armenian highland.
Moreover, on the dynastic level, the link with Armenia is historically certain: Miroslava, Samuel's daughter, married Ashot Taronites, an Armenian nobleman of the Bagratid house of Taron in Byzantine service.
In the Middle Ages, political and state loyalty counted far more than ethnic identity in the modern sense. Regardless of his genetic heritage or folkloric suggestions, such as those that would make even the Gampr shepherd dogs or the court's Van cats Armenian, Samuel ruled as a Bulgarian monarch, perceiving himself and his kingdom as the legitimate continuation of the Bulgarian Empire.
