Greece is returning the remains of Tsar Samuil to Bulgaria, Prime Minister Rumen Radev said at the opening of the Government’s weekly meeting on Tuesday. “We have reached a historic agreement on the return of the remains of Tsar Samuil,” he said, adding that the agreement was the result of active talks between the two countries.
Radev urged Bulgarians to attend an event in Sofia’s central Battenberg Square on October 3 for the arrival of the Tsar’s remains and “pay tribute to a great Bulgarian ruler”.
In the morning of the same day, he will be at the Museum of Byzantine Culture in Thessaloniki, where, at a ceremony hosted by the Prime Minister of Greece, the remains of Tsar Samuil will officially be handed over to the Bulgarian state. They will be flown to Sofia by a Spartan aircraft to Sofia and will be placed in a sarcophagus in the Church of St Sophia, where, as a child, the future Tsar of Bulgaria was introduced to Christianity.
The remains from two other sarcophagi discovered in the same church will also be handed over to Bulgaria. They are believed to belong to Tsar Gavrail Radomir and other members of the royal family.
At today’s meeting, the Cabinet will approve the text of an agreement between Bulgaria and Greece, authorising the Minister of Culture to sign it together with his Greek counterpart. The agreement provides for the reciprocal transfer for safekeeping of historical artefacts, as well as religious and cultural artefacts and relics, Radev said.
The Bulgarian state’s efforts to recover the remains of Tsar Samuil date back to 1965, when world-renowned Greek archaeologist Prof. Nikolaos Moutsopoulos discovered them during excavations at the basilica built by Samuil on the island of St Achillios in the Small Prespa Lake, where Samuil had his summer residence, the Prime Minister said.
He stressed that for six decades the Bulgarian state had never ceased its efforts to recover the remains of Tsar Samuil.
“We have had the historic honour of achieving this, and I would like to express my deepest gratitude to the Prime Minister of friendly Greece, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, for the statesmanlike vision, political courage and determination to achieve this agreement together, which further strengthens the ties between our two countries,” Radev said.
He stressed that today the memory of Samuil unites rather than divides the two countries, while their common membership of the EU helps each country to better understand the sensitivities of the other.
