Arts and culture

Cyrillic

About cyrillic and its history

serbian_writing_cirilyc_cirilica

Cyrillic alphabet is the most widely used slavic alphabet. It is based on the glagolitic alphabet, influenced by greek alphabet, and is used nowadays by the Serbs, Bulgarians, Russians and Macedonians, once it was used by the Croats and Romanians.

It got its name in 15^th century in Kiev school. The glagolitic alphabet was called Kurilovic until 11^th century. It is widely accepted that the glagolitic alphabet was invented by brothers Cyril and Methodius from Thessaloniki helped by Saint Clement of Ohrid, their disciple.

The alphabet was disseminated along with the old church slavic liturgical language and the brothers Cyril and Methodius had a mission to teach illiterates, which is considered the beginning of slavic christian culture among Serbs.

The old slavic alphabet is closely related to unical cursive greek in 9^th century from which 23 letters were adopted and 14 new were added. In time, religious and secular alphabets developed that are still in use by the Serbs, Russians, Ukranians and Bulgarians.

Vuk Stefanovic Karadzic (1787-1862) reformed serbian alphabet in 1814. in Vienna eliminating some existing letters, creating an alphabet of 30 letters.

The oldest cyrillic record is Samuil’s inscription from 993. discovered in village German in Macedonia, near Prespan lake. Several smaller cyrillic documents were discovered in 1930. in Preslav, former Bulgarian capital. It is thought they date from the period of king Simeoun’s reign.