Happy Ss. Cyril and Methodius day!

[abooth]

Apparently, some people celebrate the life of some other saint today, but in the Roman ordo, today is the feast of Ss. Cyril and Methodius*! Their story would make rather a good Hollywood movie: they had a big difficult thing to do (evangelising the Slavs); their local boss was a bit of a meany, but their local boss had a bigger boss who liked

Comments

[berkeleyfarm]

They were duly commemorated at St M's midweek service today - white stole and an Improving Reading about their lives.

[anonymous]

Actually Cyril was not involved in the construction of the Cyrillic alphabet--it's due to his disciples, whose names I've forgotten. Cyril was the inventor of the precursor alphabet called Glagolitic, which was supressed by the Frankish church heirarchy when the Moravian state was destoyed by the Franks and Magyars, at which time the two students pushed on down the Danube to Bulgaria. The only letters that survive of Cyril's fashioning are the letters rendering 'sh,' 'shch' and 'ts,' which he lifted from Hebrew. (The other Glagolitic characters are pretty bizarre looking.)
c