Glagolitic

Glagolitic is among the few scripts in history whose invention can be placed with a person, a purpose and a date. In 862 the Moravian prince Rastislav asked Byzantium for teachers who could preach in the Slavic tongue, and the emperor sent two brothers from Thessalonica, Constantine the Philosopher, remembered as Saint Cyril, and Methodius. For the mission, around 863, Constantine devised a wholly new alphabet fitted precisely to Slavic phonology, with letters for sounds no Greek script could write, and with it he and his circle translated the Gospels and the liturgy into the dialect now called Old Church Slavonic. The letterforms are original: they draw on Greek minuscule and possibly on Semitic models, and medieval tradition read symbolic intent into them, the first letter, for the word az, being formed of a cross. The script's name comes from the Slavic glagolati, to speak.

The brothers defended Slavic worship in Rome against the view that liturgy belonged only to Hebrew, Greek and Latin, and won papal approval for it, a landmark in the principle that a people may pray in its own language and letters. Tradition also credits the brothers with training the first generation of Slavic clergy to read and copy the new script, planting a scribal culture along with an alphabet.

Glagolitic's later history is a long retreat with one remarkable stronghold. In Bulgaria the disciples of Cyril and Methodius, expelled from Moravia after 885, trained a new generation of scribes, but there the Greek-based Cyrillic alphabet soon displaced the harder Glagolitic for most uses, and across the Orthodox Slavic world Glagolitic dwindled to a learned memory, surviving in early monuments such as the Kiev Folia and the codices of Ohrid. The exception was Croatia.

Along the Adriatic coast and on the islands, above all Krk, an angular Croatian form of the script became the vehicle of a Roman-rite liturgy in Church Slavonic, a privilege confirmed by Rome in the thirteenth century, making the Croatian Glagolites the only western Catholics with a canonical non-Latin liturgy for centuries.

The Baska tablet of about 1100, a royal donation record in Glagolitic, is treasured as a founding monument of Croatian literacy. Glagolitic missals were printed as incunabula, and the script remained in living liturgical use in pockets of Dalmatia into the twentieth century. Today it is a national symbol in Croatia, taught, carved on monuments, and kept ceremonially alive, the last visible descendant of Cyril's missionary alphabet.