On May 24, Bulgaria celebrates Bulgarian Education and Culture, and Slavonic Literature Day. To mark the occasion, LUCY COOPER looks at the origins of Bulgaria's Cyrillic alphabet, while ANDREA ENRIGHT examines a groundbreaking new theory that asks whether the Thracians could have been the creators of the world's first written script.


Cyril and Methodius: Men of letters

If you happen to be walking past the national library in Sofia on Wednesday May 24 you will most likely see a crowd of people gathered around the statues in front of the building, some of them laying flowers. This is because May 24 is Bulgarian Education and Culture, and Slavonic Literature Day. The statues are of the two brothers Cyril and Methodius (usually referred to as Kyril i Methodi in Bulgarian), who invented the first alphabet of the Slavic people: the Glagolitic alphabet. It is from this alphabet that Cyrillic, now used in various forms in Bulgaria, Russia, Belarus, Macedonia, Serbia and Ukraine, was derived.

Cyril, christened Konstantine (827 - 869 CE), and Methodius (826-885) were born to a Byzantine family in Thessaloniki in the 9th century. Their father, a high-ranking military official, died when they were still young, and they passed into the care of their uncle, a Byzantine official responsible for the postal services and diplomatic relations in the region. He was also involved in initiating an educational programme in the Empire, which founded the University Magnura in Constantinople, where Cyril later taught as a professor of philosophy, earning him the honorary title Konstantine the Philosopher.

The brothers were theologians and teachers and Christian missionaries, sent to spread Christianity among the Slavic people. It was for this purpose that they devised the Glagolitic alphabet. Along with their disciples: Klement, Konstantine, Angelarius, Lauretius, Gorazd and Naum, they translated Christian texts for the Slavs. Cyril was the first to translate the New Testament into this new alphabet.

The last, and probably most famous, of their missions, took place in 862 CE, when Prince Ratislav of Great Moravia (present-day Slovakia and Moravia) requested that Slavic-speaking missionaries come to his country. He wanted to counter the political power that he felt the German priesthood held in his country. He sought the assistance of the Byzantine Empire to redress the balance in support of his own rule by spreading Christianity in the language of the people, as opposed to Latin. Having already completed various missions and established themselves as learned men, Cyril and Methodius were selected for this task.

Cyril was a linguist. In preparation for their journey, he set about translating the holy texts into the Slavic language. However, he found the Greek alphabet unsuitable for recording the language as it lacked many of the sounds specific to Slavic. He set about making a new alphabet that would accommodate the sounds of Slavic, such as the nasal o and e, the reduced vowel and consonant groups sst and zzd.

The result was the Glagolitic alphabet, the first written alphabet of the Slavic people. The name "Glagolitic" comes from the Old Slavonic "glagol", meaning "words", and "glagolati", "to speak". It is sometimes referred to as "the marks that speak". There were 41 letters in the original alphabet. There are various theories as to where its origins are derived from. Twenty-four of the letters are said to have their root in cursive Greek; "sha", "shta" and "tsi" are thought to come from Hebrew; and others from ancient Slavic runes used in sacred texts of the pre-Christian Slavic religion.

It is thought that the Slavic dialect in the Thessaloniki region was used as the basis for the creation of the alphabet. This formed the basis of the literary standard known as Old Church Slavonic. Old Church Slavonic was used as the liturgical language of the Russian Orthodox church between the 9th and 12th centuries, until a more modern form known as Church Slavonic appeared in about the 14th century. Church Slavonic is still used today by some Orthodox churches, such as the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, the Russian Orthodox church and the Serbian Orthodox Church, as well as some Greek Catholic Churches in their services and chants.

The use of the Glagolitic alphabet was outlawed in Moravia by the Pope in 886, in favour of Latin, and disciples of Cyril and Methodius were exiled. Some travelled to Bulgaria. Clement and Naum set up academies in Ohrid (present-day Macedonia) and Preslav (northeast Bulgaria) to further the development of Slavic letters and liturgy. King Boris I had declared Christianity the official religion of Bulgaria in 865. Official ceremonies were initially conducted in Greek by clergy from the Byzantine Empire. But Boris feared that the growing Byzantine influence would weaken the state, and welcomed the introduction of the use of the Slavic language and alphabet in the church as a means of preserving Bulgaria's independence. Students of the Ohrid and Preslav academies spread the use of the Glagolitic alphabet to other places such as Croatia and Bohemia (situated in present-day Czechoslovakia).

At the beginning of the 10th century, the Cyrillic script was developed. It is popularly believed to have been devised by one of Cyril and Methodius' disciples, Clement, known today as St Clement of Ohrid. However, some argue that in fact the oldest Cyrillic inscriptions are to be found in northeast Bulgaria, making it more likely that it was developed at the Preslav school. The Cyrillic script used simplified versions of the letters in the Glagolitic alphabet, and also had some similarities with Greek. It was named in honour of Cyril.
Several alphabets of between 28 and 44 letters, were used in the beginning and middle of the 19th century until Marin Drinov, a Bulgarian historian and philologist and founding member of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, proposed a standardised alphabet of 32 letters in the 1870s. This was used until the reform of 1945, which brought us the alphabet now used in Bulgaria today.

At least, this is one version of the story. Like language itself, which is constantly evolving - some parts getting lost, others changing beyond recognition - and always manipulated by the speaker, the story surrounding Cyril and Methodius and the birth of the Glagolitic and Cyrillic alphabets, has many forms and will change depending on who is telling it. But the essence remains. The brothers and monks Cyril and Methodius brought the Slavic people a means of recording and disseminating knowledge in their own language, therefore, strengthening their sense of identity as separate from the Latin based tradition of Western Europe. Indeed, as the adage goes, knowledge is power. It is this great contribution to literature and culture that is celebrated on May 24.