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Happy Day of Saints Cyril and Methodius, of the Bulgarian alphabet, education and culture, and of Slavic literature!
The Bulgarian script is the most significant, successful and lasting work in our millennial historyIt is used by over 300 million people in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Povardaria; even the non-Slavs in Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan. We know that since 1968 the Bulgarian Orthodox Church (BOC) celebrates the holy brothers on May 11, and since 1980 they are Christian saints of both the Vatican and among the six patrons of Europe . Also, that Saint Cyril, i.e. Konstantin-Kyril the Philosopher, sculpted the Glagolitic – the first Slavic alphabet. And that 30 years after his death, at the behest of Tsar Simeon IV, Kliment Ohridski created the Bulgarian script (klimentitsa), commonly called Cyrillic.
*Let’s also pay dues to all the other personalities of that era who contributed most tangibly to the creation and confirmation of our alphabet! Chronologically, the Byzantine patriarch Photius stands out. He supports the intentions of Tsar Boris I to make Christianity the official state religion in Bulgaria and in other countries, if it is practiced in the native language. Despite the risk of erosion of the still understrength population in our country. By 855, Photius commissioned the senior Byzantine officials Cyril and Methodius to create an alphabet and translate the necessary liturgical books. And the most important, the patriarch canonically recognizes the alphabet. Otherwise, it would be heretical, just like its authors, Tsar Boris I and the Bulgarians. Popes Hadrian III, Nicholas I and John VII also gave canonical recognition to the new alphabet by deliberate decrees. And this is a historical merit against the background of the bloody wars after the translation of the Bible into German in the 15th century! Millions of Europeans died in them, and countries with millions of people broke away from Catholicism and became Protestant.
**The creators of the Bulgarian alphabet are St. The septuagenarians Clement, Naum, Gorazd, Sava and Angelarius with the pioneers, spiritual fathers and ideologues Cyril and Methodius. It turns out that the outlines of the Glagolitic letters are difficult and for the future priests and the first five Disciples create an easier alphabet. The Holy Septuagints confirm it, spread it; prepare priests in the new script, which has traditionally retained the name Cyrillic in the world. After the death of Cyril (869) and Methodius (885), the Slavic language was thrown out of worship in Great Moravia by the German clergy, and the priest-disciples of Methodius were removed from the churches. Bulgarian subjects were not sold into slavery, but extradited to Bulgaria, requested by Tsar Boris I. At that time, Bulgaria was a great power and the German kingdom had a very bitter experience with it from a war (829-831) for the lands of today’s Hungary and dare not risk refusing to release Gorazd, Clement, Naum, Lavrentius, and Angelarius. For 7 years – by order of the Tsar – they trained 20,000 priests, literate in the new script and produced 300-400,000 liturgical books, necessary in one day to switch to the liturgy in the Bulgarian language by official law. That is why the Holy Brothers + Disciples were canonized by the people and subsequently by the BOC as “Saints of the Seven”. The Church traditionally does not include Constantine Preslavski among them, because he was not canonized, although he was considered a direct disciple of Methodius. And he is “suspected” to be Black-faced Brave. In 893, the Preslav People’s Assembly (then National Assembly) formalized the script.
**Diplomat-poet Krasin Khimirski summarizes that along with the co-authorship of the idea of creating the alphabet, the diplomatic efforts before the Vatican to recognize its canonicity, providing the opportunity to verify the effectiveness of the new script, the greatest merits of Tsar Boris I are the provision of a huge human, economic and political resource for its confirmation. The redirection of 20,000 young men from military service to training for priests has apparently caused displeasure to regional military-administrative leaders. The production of 300-400,000 books requires 15-20 million lambs and goats to be slaughtered. We know that in that era the leaves of books were made of parchment – a specially treated skin of a young animal. A maximum of 8 sheets were obtained from one lamb or kid, and a book had a minimum of 300-350 pages. All this is expensive, as well as the labor of thousands of artisans, specialists in the processing of leather.
*****A big meal of lamb and kid would have gone down then! The Sixth “American” (= of the USA) fleet was also missing, so that we could export it to him, as well as the EU, in order to reduce our sheep farming by dozens of times and become dependent on imports of what not !!!*****
There are no printers, and the text of each book must be copied by hand by graduates of the Seventh-day Adventist schools. For their accommodation between 886-893, huge financial, production and human resources were allocated for the construction of dozens of monasteries from Varna to Debar. And all this was done without opportunities to borrow, without European funds! After “loading” all Bulgarian churches with books and literate people in 893, Pechenegs burned the books in the churches during an attack in Dobruja. But the surviving population buys books from other parts of Bulgaria unaffected by the attack. Colossal foresight of Tsar Boris I!
For comparison: in the Bulgarian lands in the 4th – 5th centuries, two more scripts were created, the Gothic and the Thracian, respectively by their bishops Nikita of the Renaissance and Vulfila. But there is no state behind them. 2-3 monasteries and a dozen or two churches are filled with the books they created. And in some barbarian invasion they were destroyed.
**As K. Khimirski writes, once again the media will flood us with reverent words of tribute to the work of the two brothers. And since 1991, the monuments of St. St. Cyril and Methodius already number more than eighty: in Bulgaria, Russia, Greece, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Povardaria, Hungary, Portugal, Mongolia…, in Chicago, even in “Pimpireva” Antarctica.
*I hope that President Putin will no longer parrot the Skopje narrow-mindedness that “Slavic writing came to Russia from the Macedonian land”. Soon his advisors got acquainted with the researches and words of Academician Dmitry Likhachov that “Bulgaria is the cradle of Slavic culture, gave the upper layer of the language of the Eastern Slavs”. Or with the similar and clarifying findings of Ralya Zeitlin (RF). Will they repeat the absurd fiction of Lomonosov (1711-1765): that during the Khazar mission in the Crimea, the Brothers saw “RUSH letters” that served to create the Glagolitic script? Well, there are other ignorant “brother-theories”: the author of the alphabet is Lenin, even Peter the Great. This is probably why Soviet contemporaries wondered what alphabet we used to write until the Second World War. Let’s hope the Russian Cultural and Information Centers no longer launch a “new version” about the Holy Brothers, that they were “reformers of the Slavic alphabet” and creators of the “Church Slavic language”!
*****On May 24, it is appropriate to remember the words of Prof. Bozhidar Dimitrov regarding the numerous inquiries how is it correct to say “slavic” or “old/bulgarian” alphabet? His answer is: Bulgarian, because even in the 9th and 11th centuries we wrote in the Bulgarian alphabet! There could not be a Slavic alphabet, since even in the Middle Ages and today not all nations called “Slavic” /this is also inaccurate/ write in our alphabet – Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Croats, Slovenes. Slavs is a later concept. Many of these peoples have mixed origins. Russians and Poles also had Viking roots. The Czechs – Gothic, and the Bulgarians Iranian. Moreover, the alphabet was established only in Bulgaria by a law passed by the People’s Assembly (= NA) in Preslav in 893. In today’s Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the geographical area of Macedonia, it was established due to the simple fact that these territories and countries fully or partially /were/ within the borders of Bulgaria. And on the territories of today’s Russia, Ukraine and Belarus through Bulgarian missionaries. And so, the correct term is “Bulgarian” or “Old Bulgarian”.
We also lived through the embattled presidency of Petar Stoyanov from the P-d, who “strived” to replace our alphabet with Latin letters and barely, but “skolasa”, to return the “History of Slavonic Bulgaria” to the original of the Greeks. It’s good that the Shumen Armenian entrepreneur Karen Aleksanyan lives in our country to create the Court of Letters with a sculpture of the national master Ruben Nalbandyan !!! Our over-inflated administration and big business are thrifty towards national and common human causes! Especially if they do not have the “advantage” of European subsidies.
****It is a pity that the heirs of two of the nodal ethnicities of our Liberators in 1878 succumbed to external incitement and delusions of grandeur and invincibility, that they single-handedly liberated Europe from fascism and are in military conflict with each other! Bulgaria has no and cannot be interested in the fratricidal war between the two largest using countries OUR LITERACY – I repeat – the most significant, successful and lasting work in our history! And because of overwhelmingly foreign overseas, geopolitical and “kelepir” interests!
The two countries, despite Great Russian chauvinism and Ukrainian nationalism, are closest to us genetically, historically, in terms of mentality, education, culture and literature! The countries to which Bulgaria has the maximum contribution in demography, state structure, religions, to whose current military conflict we should observe strict neutrality, providing only humanitarian aid and care for the Bulgarian diaspora in the two great Slavic countries!
***But let us wish them peace, with a preceding cessation of hostilities and a truce! And with joint efforts to turn our Black Sea into a zone of peace and good neighborliness! In an area only for Black Sea ships, sailboats, water bikes and slides, surfboards, for beachgoers and gentle vacationers, including children!
*And while the partner-allies-“chorbajilar” from Washington, Berlin, Paris, Brussels, Ankara and so on. they did not cancel the Holiday let’s sing: “Go people born again…!”
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