The Glagolitic of Cyril and Methodius: the first script of the Slavs

In 862 Prince Rastislav of Moravia sent an embassy to the Byzantine emperor Michael III. He asked for teachers able to instruct his subjects in the Christian faith in their own language, and not in Latin, as the Frankish missionaries did. The choice fell on two brothers from Thessalonica, Constantine and Methodius, who knew well the Slavic language spoken around their city. They set out the following year, bringing with them an entirely new script.

A script created for a mission

According to the Life of Constantine, written in Old Slavonic shortly after his death, God revealed the letters to the philosopher after prayer, and he at once began translating the Gospel. This was Glagolitic, an alphabet of about forty signs with original shapes, full of circles, triangles and crosses. The first letter, az, has the shape of a cross, and some scholars have seen a symbolic intent in these elements, although the hypothesis remains debated.

With Glagolitic the two brothers translated the Gospels, the liturgical books and part of the Scriptures into the language we now call Old Church Slavonic. The Frankish clergy protested: according to some, only Hebrew, Greek and Latin, the three languages of the inscription on the cross, were worthy of the liturgy. Constantine rejected this view, which his biographers call the trilingual heresy.

Rome and San Clemente

In 867 and 868 the brothers travelled to Rome, where Pope Adrian II approved the Slavonic books. Constantine, gravely ill, entered a monastery taking the name Cyril and died in Rome on 14 February 869. He was buried in the basilica of San Clemente, where he is still venerated today, because the two brothers had brought to Rome relics attributed to Pope Clement I. Methodius became archbishop and continued the work until his death in 885.

After the death of Methodius his disciples were driven out of Moravia and found refuge in Bulgaria, welcomed by Prince Boris I. In the schools of Ohrid and Preslav, at the end of the ninth century, a new alphabet was born based on Greek capitals, with the addition of some Glagolitic letters for Slavic sounds. It was called Cyrillic in honour of the master, even though Cyril did not invent it.

The long life of Glagolitic in Croatia

While Cyrillic spread in Bulgaria, Serbia and Russia, Glagolitic survived above all along the Croatian coast and in the islands of the Kvarner Gulf. The Baška tablet, on the island of Krk, carved around 1100, is one of the oldest monuments of the Croatian language. In 1248 Pope Innocent IV authorised the Slavonic liturgy in Glagolitic script in the diocese of Senj, and in 1483 the first Croatian book was printed, a missal in Glagolitic characters.

Among the oldest Glagolitic manuscripts are the Kiev Folia, the Codex Zographensis and the Codex Assemanianus, kept in the Vatican Apostolic Library. At the beginning of the tenth century a monk known as Chrabr wrote a short treatise in defence of the Slavic letters, asserting that, unlike the Greek ones, they had been created by a saint.

In 1980 Pope John Paul II proclaimed Cyril and Methodius co-patrons of Europe. The recognition recalls that their choice to translate the liturgy into the language of the people, together with the creation of a dedicated script, gave rise to the written cultures of much of the Slavic world. In Bulgaria, 24 May is still the national day of Slavic writing.