They have been found in the medieval city itself, and at nearby Patleina Monastery, both in present-day Shumen Province, in the Ravna Monastery and in the Varna Monastery. The earliest datable Cyrillic inscriptions have been found in the area of Preslav.

Unlike the Churchmen in Ohrid, Preslav scholars were much more dependent upon Greek models and quickly abandoned the Glagolitic scripts in favor of an adaptation of the Greek uncial to the needs of Slavic, which is now known as the Cyrillic alphabet. Modern scholars believe that Cyrillic was developed and formalized by the early disciples of Cyril and Methodius in the Preslav Literary School, the most important early literary and cultural centre of the First Bulgarian Empire and of all Slavs: The script is named in honor of the Saint Cyril, one of the two Byzantine brothers, Saints Cyril and Methodius, who created the Glagolitic alphabet earlier on. These additional letters were used for Old Church Slavonic sounds not found in Greek. For centuries Cyrillic was used by Catholic and Muslim Slavs too (see Bosnian Cyrillic).Ĭyrillic is derived from the Greek uncial script, augmented by letters from the older Glagolitic alphabet, including some ligatures. The new script became the basis of alphabets used in various languages, especially those of Orthodox Slavic origin, and non-Slavic languages influenced by Bulgarian. The usage of the Cyrillic script in Bulgaria was made official in 893. In the 9th century AD, the Bulgarian tsar Simeon I the Great – following the cultural and political course of his father Boris I – commissioned a new script, the Early Cyrillic alphabet, to be made at the Preslav Literary School in the First Bulgarian Empire, which would replace the Glagolitic script, produced earlier by Saints Cyril and Methodius and the same disciples that created the new Slavic script in Bulgaria. With the accession of Bulgaria to the European Union on 1 January 2007, Cyrillic became the third official script of the European Union, following the Latin and Greek alphabets.

The Cyrillic script ( / s ɪ ˈ r ɪ l ɪ k/ sə- RIL-ik) is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia and is used as the national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking countries in Southeastern Europe, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia, North Asia and East Asia.Īs of 2019, around 250 million people in Eurasia use Cyrillic as the official script for their national languages, with Russia accounting for about half of them. Excerpt from the manuscript 'Bdinski Zbornik'.

Srpska azbuka latinica