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Inventing Cyrillic

The Cyrillic alphabet is celebrated across the Slavonic-speaking world, but not only as an appreciation of literacy – it has a political dimension too. Used by over 250 million people across the Balkans, Russia, Ukraine, the Baltic, Central Asia and as far as Mongolia, the Cyrillic alphabet, almost unique among the world’s alphabets, has its own holiday.

The landscape of Eastern Europe is saturated with commemorative monuments: roads, schools, universities, libraries, chapels, statues, passport pages, all named after the brothers or bearing their likeness. By chance, this also aligned with the papacy’s own goals to take greater ecclesiastical control of that region and thus reduce the influence of the East Frankish kings and their church. Boris’ own ethnicity is unclear: his predecessors on the Bulgar throne were certainly Turkic speakers, his is the first name of Slavonic origin in the list of Bulgarian rulers.

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