Bulgaria lays Tsar Samuel's bones in Sofia as Greece takes back 48 relics

Bulgaria received the remains attributed to Tsar Samuel on Saturday and laid them in St Sophia Basilica in Sofia, in a state ceremony that closed a negotiation with Greece measured in decades.

The bones were flown from Thessaloniki. Two pairs of fighters, MiG-29s and F-16s, escorted the aircraft. A guard of honour met the coffin at Sofia airport. At Knyaz Alexander I Square, 21 artillery salutes were fired during the national anthem. The coffin was then carried to the basilica and placed in a marble sarcophagus. President Iliana Iotova, National Assembly chair Michaela Dotsova, Prime Minister Rumen Radev and ministers attended. The public could pay respects at the basilica. Free transport had been laid on for pilgrims.

Samuel ruled the First Bulgarian Empire and died in 1014, after the defeat at Kleidion in which Byzantine forces under Basil II blinded thousands of his soldiers. He is treated in Bulgaria as the ruler who held the state against Constantinople. Archaeologists found the remains more than 60 years ago in a border area of Greece. They have sat there through the Cold War and through every later attempt to agree a handover. Saturday was the day the box came home.

The exchange is not one-way. Under the agreement, Bulgaria is returning 48 relics to Athens: icons, crosses and ecclesiastical vessels taken by Bulgarian troops from churches and monasteries in northern Greece during the First World War. For more than a century they were held at the National History Museum in Sofia. Greek officials have used the handover to point at the Parthenon marbles in the British Museum, and to say London should follow the same logic. That comparison is political. The legal basis of the two cases is not the same. The 48 objects were removed in wartime by an occupying army. The marbles were cut from the Acropolis under an Ottoman firman that Athens disputes. The ceremony still puts both arguments in the same news cycle.

Radev, speaking in Sofia, said Europe should not reopen old wounds and should work for peace as the highest good. Patriarch Daniil called the remains a sacred relic of national, ecclesiastical and ethnic memory, and said Samuel returns to his people to remain in Bulgaria and to rest in that church. He thanked those who found the bones, those who kept them, and those who brought them back.

The identification is the part a historian will still mark as attributed rather than certain. The remains were found in a grave linked by archaeologists to Samuel. A state funeral does not add a DNA test. Bulgaria has chosen to treat them as his, and Greece has chosen to release them. The 21-gun salute and the fighter escort are the political fact. The scientific fact is the find spot and the long argument over custody.

For the relics going the other way, the consequence is simpler. Forty-eight objects leave a Sofia museum and return to the Greek church and state that lost them in 1916-18. Congregations in northern Greece get back vessels their grandparents knew from inventories, not from display cases. The open question is whether the Parthenon line Athens attached to the day produces any movement in London, or whether it stays a sentence in a speech.