As a native speaker of Polish, I imagined that I would have an advantage in learning Bulgarian since both of them are Slavonic languages. I was right, Polish and Bulgarian share plenty of similarities in vocabulary but also the grammatical structure and as long as I could spot them when listening to the language, it was rather impossible to do so while reading because of the Cyrillic script (кирилица), which is definitively not intuitive for the users of Latin alphabet. This was and still is the biggest challenge for me during the language classes, however, just after few days I sort of fell in love with it because figuring out the Cyrillic script feels a lot like decoding some secret messages.
I remember studying during my history classes about Cyril and Methodius, but it was treated like an anecdote, another event in the history of the script that we quickly moved on from to studying another war or something “more important”. Having the opportunity of studying Bulgarian was then a wonderful chance for me to dive more into this topic.
When I started doing research on the Cyrillic script and I typed it in Google, one of the first searches that popped up was “Russian Alphabet”. Well, it is not incorrect. Sure enough, Russian alphabet is based upon the Cyrillic script, however, not many people know that the earliest Cyrillic alphabet was not originally created for Russian language or in Russia but instead for Bulgarian in First Bulgarian Empire in 9 AD.
As the invention of cuneiform, the earliest systems of writing, by Sumerians marks the beginning of antiquity, the invention of first Glagolitic and then the Cyrillic alphabet also opens up a new era, a new era for the Slavonic culture. But let us start from the beginning.
In 863 two missionary brothers, Cyril and Methodius introduced a new system of writing called Glagolitic which helped transcribe liturgical books in the old Slavic language. For this, they were awarded the title of “Apostles to the Slavs”. After they died, the descendants of their work dispersed across Europe. Some of them reached the territory of the Bulgarian Empire. The Bulgarian Tsar Boris I, who had been relentlessly trying to unite Slavic tribes for a long time, decided to take advantage of them. He wanted to form a nation based on mutual culture instead of glueing it by warfare. He also feared the growing dependence of his state on the Byzantine Empire which was caused by the adoption of Christianity in Bulgaria in 865 and a stream of clergy sent from the Byzantine Empire who conducted religious ceremonies in Greek. In order to strengthen the political independence and stability of his state Boris, I established Pliska Literary School and commissioned the descendants of Cyril and Methodius to work on a new alphabet that was more suitable for the Bulgarian language. They achieved it by combining the Glagolitic and the Greek alphabet. The new alphabet, much simpler than the Glagolitic, was called the Cyrillic alphabet.
Their work contributed immensely to documenting Slavonic languages and culture but also to the building, at least linguistically, independent Slavonic nation.
Then the Cyrillic alphabet was borrowed from Bulgaria and, mainly due to the Russian influences, adapted to many Slavic-, Turkic- and Persian-languages, so that today, we have not one but multiple Cyrillic alphabets that form the writing system called the Cyrillic script, which is used by around 250 million people. On the 1 of January, with the accession of Bulgaria to the EU, the Cyrillic script became the third official script to the European Union.
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