Cyril and Methodius and the Slavic mission
Two brothers from Thessalonica take Christianity to the Slavs in their own language, inventing an alphabet and laying the foundations of Slavic Orthodoxy.
- The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe, 500–1453 — Dimitri Obolensky, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (1971)
- The Orthodox Church — Timothy Ware, Penguin (1993)
- The Orthodox Church: An Introduction to its History, Doctrine, and Spiritual Culture — John Anthony McGuckin, Wiley-Blackwell (2008)
In 862 Prince Rastislav of Great Moravia, in today’s Czech Republic and Slovakia, asked Constantinople for teachers who could explain the faith in Slavic. The emperor sent two brothers from Thessalonica who had grown up speaking the local Slavic dialect: Constantine, a brilliant scholar who took the monastic name Cyril shortly before his death, and Methodius. They arrived in 863, devised a new alphabet, Glagolitic, and translated the Gospels and the liturgy.
- The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe, 500–1453 — Dimitri Obolensky, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (1971)
- The Orthodox Church — Timothy Ware, Penguin (1993)
German Latin clergy opposed them, insisting worship must be in Hebrew, Greek or Latin, and after Methodius died in 885 his disciples were expelled. They found refuge in Bulgaria, whose ruler Boris had been baptised around 864. There, at Ohrid and Preslav, the simpler Cyrillic script was developed and a Slavonic Christian literature flowered that later passed to Serbia and to Kyivan Rus’.
- The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe, 500–1453 — Dimitri Obolensky, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (1971)
- The Orthodox Church: An Introduction to its History, Doctrine, and Spiritual Culture — John Anthony McGuckin, Wiley-Blackwell (2008)
- The Orthodox Church — Timothy Ware, Penguin (1993)
Why it matters today
Church Slavonic, the liturgical language the brothers created, is still sung in Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian and Ukrainian churches, and the Cyrillic alphabet named after Cyril is used by some 250 million people. Their principle, worship in the people's own tongue, shaped Orthodox missions from Alaska to Japan.