Two Brothers and an Alphabet

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Old Church Slavonic exists because two brothers from Thessalonica were sent on a diplomatic mission and decided the mission needed its own alphabet first. In 863, the Byzantine missionaries Constantine, later known by his monastic name Cyril, and his brother Methodius were invited by Rostislav, the ruler of Great Moravia, to establish a Slavic speaking church hierarchy in his territory, partly as a way to counterbalance the political and religious influence of Bavarian Frankish clergy already active there. Before the brothers traveled, Constantine devised the Glagolitic alphabet, an entirely new set of characters adapted from Greek letterforms with additional signs invented for Slavic sounds Greek had no way to write, and used it to translate the Gospels and core liturgical texts into the Slavic dialect of their native Thessalonica, the language now called Old Church Slavonic. This made Old Church Slavonic the first Slavic language ever committed to writing and the liturgy the brothers built around it the first Christian service conducted in a Slavic vernacular rather than in Greek or Latin. Constantine died in Rome in February 869, only six years into the mission, but Methodius continued the work for another sixteen years, and Old Church Slavonic went on to become the base literary language for Slavic Orthodox Christianity across Eastern Europe, later written in the Cyrillic script credited to the brothers' own students rather than Glagolitic itself, which fell out of everyday use but survived in a handful of Croatian churches for centuries afterward.