10.10
Shortly after returning to Sofia, Boris died of apparent heart failure on 28 August 1943. Conspiracy theories instantly sprang up, many choosing to believe that he was poisoned by Hitler in an attempt to put a more obedient government in place. The evening before the illness occurred, Boris had an official dinner in the Italian embassy. Others suggest that his death was a Communist plot to destabilize the monarchy, and that Boris was poisoned while visiting the Rila Monastery before getting ill. The question has never been settled and many people remain of the belief that Boris was murdered, in spite of no evidence being available. An autopsy of Boris’s heart conducted in the early 1990s revealed the cause of his death to be an infarction of the left ventricle, which for many laid to rest any speculation of foul play. Boris was succeeded by his six-year-old son Simeon II under a Regency Council headed by his brother, Prince Kyril of Bulgaria.
Following a large and impressive State Funeral at the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, Sofia, where the streets were lined with weeping crowds, the coffin of Tsar Boris III was taken by train to the mountains and buried in Bulgaria’s largest and most important monastery, the Rila Monastery. After taking power in September 1944, the Communist-dominated government had his body exhumed and secretly buried in the courtyard of the Vrana Palace near Sofia. At a later time the Communist authorities removed the zinc coffin from Vrana and moved it to a secret location, which remains unknown to this day. After the fall of communism, an excavation attempt was made at the Vrana Palace, in which only Boris’s heart was found, as it had been put in a glass cylinder outside the coffin. The heart was taken by his widow in 1993 to Rila Monastery where it was reinterred.
A wood-carving is placed on the left side of his grave in the Rila monastery, made on 10 October 1943 by inhabitants of the village of Osoi, Debar district. The wood-carving has the following inscription:
To its Tzar Liberator Boris III, from grateful Macedonia.