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. Celebrated across the Slavonic-speaking states, the International Day of the Slavonic Alphabet and Culture takes place on 24 May in the Orthodox world and 5 July in the Catholic world.
Each year there are concerts and parades in honour of the ninth-century brothers who are credited with the invention of the letters, the Byzantine diplomats Constantine-Cyril and Methodius. 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. From a Cyril and Methodius statue deep in Siberia’s Novosibirsk, to Cyril and Methodius Local Library in Prijedor, Bosnia, it is hard to ignore or avoid the brothers’ presence.
Hardly any other alphabet is shown such reverence – South Korea and Armenia are the only two which come close. Users of most alphabets will not be able to name their inventor at all: who invented the Latin alphabet, for example? There is technically an answer – at least according to Roman grammarian Gaius Julius Hyginus (64 BC-AD 17). His Fabulae recorded various myths, genealogies and inventors. One such myth claims it was Carmenta – otherwise goddess of childbirth and prophecy – who invented the Latin letters.
Still, the existence of a myth does not equate to its widespread knowledge or the celebration of the inventor or their letters: other forces have to align. Some force has to propel this myth and provide material backing for its survival. Someone has to pay for the statues. While many Eastern European states argue about the specifics (were Cyril and Methodius Greek, Bulgarian or Macedonian? Was Moravia in the Czech or Slovak republic?), they agree on the following broad outline: an alphabet is a cause for celebration; and the Slavonic letters in particular were good for the Slavs as they liberated them from others’ political influence, which in turn was equated with the use of other languages’ alphabets. Each state happily pays for the statues, which you can see in cities including Prague, Skopja, Moscow and Bratislava.
But is an alphabet in itself a cause for celebration? The study of writing and literacy more generally has shifted its position on this issue. A new technology is often seen as a sign of progress; a new system of literacy, therefore, is an unambiguous advance. But in the last 20 years the school of modern literacy studies has observed, instead, that writing technologies are always structured by access to power and knowledge. Few technologies, if any, have the power to completely shake the foundations of established regimes – though they can propel a few individuals into the pre-established order (think of how quickly the radical possibility of social media became embodied in three companies of established shareholders and the face of Mark Zuckerberg). In the medieval period, access to writing was the preserve of a literate, often clerical, elite. Who, then, was a new alphabet good for? Certainly not the vast mass of illiterate Slavonic speakers in Central Europe and the Balkans.
Rather, the alphabet’s success was the product of a number of accidents. Different elites took an interest in Cyrillic and, on occasion, their aims were temporarily aligned. On the whole, however, the meaning of the new alphabet was contested.
In the 870-80s, a clerical elite in Moravia thought it could use the new letters to elevate a local Slavonic-speaking bishop to succeed Methodius, one of the inventor brothers. They were bolstered by the local ruler, Sviatoslav, who was interested in gaining political independence from his Frankish overlords. 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. In a number of letters sent by Pope John VIII in 880 we see support for Methodius and the use of the new alphabet to translate religious texts. Yet two years later the pope was dead, his successors were interested in reconciling with the Franks and in 890 the use of Slavonic in the liturgy was officially banned. Sviatoslav, meanwhile, albeit a Slavonic speaker himself, also went cold on the letters: he supported the appointment of a Latin bishop to succeed Methodius.
This would probably have been the end of the letters had it not been for Boris, the ruler of the medieval Bulgarian kingdom. In the 890s, having recently converted to Orthodox Christianity, Boris ensured his church would be independent from the Patriarchate of Constantinople. Although interested in their religion, he was clearly concerned with curtailing Byzantine influence in his newly Christianised state. The alphabet offered an opportunity: by adopting it, Boris could ensure that Byzantine culture could not arrive in Bulgaria unmediated. 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. Perhaps, by chance, the letters arrived in the Balkans just as the first Bulgarian king who might understand them was in power.
So the alphabet’s fortunes were deeply entwined with regimes of power. Elites and their institutions backed and dropped the alphabet as it served their wider agendas. Seen thus, it is hard to find the ‘Slavs’ who were liberated by these letters – and hard to find the ordinary Slavs celebrating the alphabet. Perhaps, then, we might also reconsider the contemporary celebrations across the region – not as authentic monuments of Slavic joy at technological invention, but as the same political elites and their institutions backing the letters whenever it fits their varied and contradictory political agendas.
One state trying to do this more aggressively than ever, and much to a number of others’ distaste, is Russia. Just after the invasion of Ukraine in July 2021, Vladimir Putin published an article on the Kremlin’s website: ‘On the Historical Unity of Russia and Ukraine’. Putin pointed to the medieval Rus polity which stretched across modern Russian and Ukrainian territory, from Kyiv in Ukraine to Novgorod and Yaroslavl in Russia, equating this medieval Rus with Russia, and their Old Slavonic language with Russian. Unity meant unity under Russia. On 24 May 2023 the Russian Ministry of Culture published a pointed statement about the alphabet stressing that Slavonic unity:
The Day of Slavonic Alphabet and Culture is commemorated in memory of the holy apostles Cyril and Methodius, who invented the first Slavonic alphabet and translated the holy books into the Slavonic language, thus laying the very foundation of Slavonic literacy. The primary idea of this celebration is the national and spiritual unification of the Slavonic nations, who have the same origins, traditions, customs and a unified cultural sphere.
In the context of the war, Russian claims to Slavonic unity through celebration of the letters begin to appear as veiled justifications of foreign invasion. In the ninth century as now, there was no alphabet without politics.
Mirela Ivanova is Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Sheffield and author of Inventing Slavonic: Cultures of Writing between Rome and Constantinople (Oxford University Press, 2024).