Today is May 24 - Day of Bulgarian enlightenment, culture and Slavic writing. The national holiday is celebrated every year on May 24, commemorating the creation of the Glagolitic script by the brothers Cyril and Methodius, also known as the Thessalonian brothers.
According to the church calendar, the Day of St. St. Cyril and Methodius, who created the prototype - the Glagolitic script - of the Bulgarian script, which is also a Slavic script, is celebrated on May 11.
The Glagolitic script underwent peculiar changes until it took shape in its current form - Cyrillic, in which Bulgarian, Russian, Ukrainian, Macedonian, Serbian and other languages are written. The Cyrillic alphabet is an official alphabet in Mongolia and some republics of the former Soviet Union, and until the 19th century it was also used in Romania.
In 1851, St. Cyril and Methodius were first celebrated in Plovdiv. The day later began to be celebrated as the Day of Bulgarian Education and Culture and of Slavic Writing. In 1975, the monument to the Holy Brothers Cyril and Methodius was unveiled in front of the National Library in Sofia.
The Cyrillic alphabet, which is used by nearly 11 countries as an official alphabet, is a simplified version of the Glagolitic alphabet.
The Glagolitic alphabet was created by St. Cyril and Methodius during the First Bulgarian Empire in the 9th century.
It is believed that the Glagolitic alphabet was simplified by St. Clement of Ohrid, who named the new variant Cyrillic.
In the original version of the Cyrillic alphabet, composed by St. Clement of Ohrid, there are 44 letters for the 44 sounds, unlike the current Bulgarian alphabet with 30 letters.
The Glagolitic alphabet and, therefore, the Cyrillic alphabet borrow an alphabet system from Egyptian hieroglyphs, the Proto-Sinaitic writing system and the Greek alphabet. The writing system and word structure is a combination of the Latin, Coptic, Armenian, Gregorian and Glagolitic alphabets.
The earliest inscription written in Cyrillic dates from 931 in a cave monastery near the village of Krepcha in Bulgaria. The earliest manuscripts written in Cyrillic are the “Book of Sava”, dated between the 10th and 11th centuries.
The word “alphabet” arises from the pronunciation of the first two letters of the Glagolitic script – “A” and “B”. In the same way, the Latin word “alphabet” (alphabet in English) was constructed from the Greek letters alpha and beta, the first in the Greek alphabet.
The Cyrillic alphabet is also used as a script by non-Slavic languages such as Kazakh, Mongolian, Ossetian, Tatar, Tajik and in some parts of Alaska.
The Cyrillic alphabet has been modified and simplified many times until it reaches its current form. The original Cyrillic alphabet was used only in Old Church Slavonic – the language in which church literature is written in Russia and part of Eastern Europe.
The Cyrillic alphabet is the third official alphabet of the European Union. The first, different from the Latin alphabet, is the Greek alphabet.
Each letter in the Cyrillic alphabet had its own name, which meant something. For example, A - „az” (I), B - – „buki” (letters), C - „vedi” (I know), G - „verbs” (words, speaking), D - „dobro” (goodness, kindness), etc. The names of the letters helped students to remember the alphabet and the order more easily.