Thus sentimental and commercial reasons impelled the Bulgarians to attack Salonika. Both the great Bulgarian Tsars of the tenth century, Symeon and Samuel, strove to obtain it, and during the forty years for which the famous Greek Emperor Basil, “the Bulgar-Slayer,” contended against Samuel for the mastery of Macedonia, Salonika was the headquarters, and the shrine of its patron-saint the inspiration, of the Greeks, as Ochrida was the capital of the Bulgars. We learn from the historian Kedrenos that there was at the time a party which favoured the Bulgarians in some of the Greek cities[430]; but in 1014 the Emperor, like the King of the Hellenes in 1913, and in the same defile, called by the Byzantine historian “Kleidion” (or “the key”)—which has been identified with the gorge of the Struma, not far from the notorious fort Roupel—utterly routed his rival, and took, like King Constantine, the title of “Bulgar-Slayer.” Samuel escaped, only to die of shock at the spectacle of the 15,000 blinded Bulgarian captives, each hundred guided by a one-eyed centurion, whom the victor sent back to their Tsar. Basil celebrated his triumph in the holy of holies of Hellenism, the majestic Parthenon, then the church of Our Lady of Athens, where frescoes executed at his orders still recall his visit and victory over the Bulgarians. Thus the destruction of the first Bulgarian empire was organised at Salonika and celebrated at Athens, just like the defeat of the same enemies 900 years later. But even after the fall of the Bulgarian empire we find a Bulgarian leader besieging Salonika for six days, and only repulsed by the personal intervention of St Demetrios[431], whom the terrified Bulgarian prisoners declared that they had seen on horseback leading the Greeks and breathing fire against the besiegers.