Curios Facts You Must Know about the Cyrillic Alphabet

What do you know about the Cyrillic alphabet? Perhaps once you’ve tried to read the word “ресторант” (restaurant), for example, but its meaning stood still incomprehensible. Today we want to tell you more about the script, which has its own holiday in Bulgaria – 24th of May. We’d gathered some interesting facts which will help you next time when you see our letters.

The “Cyrillic” and “Glagolitic” alphabets are the first Slavic writings. The “Glagolitic” was created by the brothers Cyril and Methodius, who later were canonized as Apostles. They adapt the new writing to the phonetic features of the Old Slavic language and translate the basic liturgical literature.

The Bulgarians are the first to use the “Cyrillic” right after its creation in the 9th Century. The alphabet is younger than most other scripts around the world.

Nowadays more than 260 million people are using Cyrillic alphabet worldwide. 224 of them are in Europe and another 60 million are in Central Asia. Bulgaria is the only EU member, that uses “Cyrillic” alphabet. The inscription “евро” (euro written in Cyrillic) is placed on the euro banknotes since 2013. The “Cyrillic” became one of the three official alphabets of the European Union, together with the Latin and Greek, after Bulgaria’s accession in 2007.

The alphabet, created by Cyril and Methodius, is used in Slavic languages like Bulgarian, Byelorussian, Macedonian, Russian, Serbian, Ukrainian. The Cyrillic is also used in some non-Slavic languages such as Aleut, Kyrgyz, Tatar and others.

The modern Bulgarian alphabet has been modified somewhat from the original, generally by the loss of some superfluous letters – about 20, for example, ѣ (the double f) ѫ (Icc big, big Nosivka) ѭ, ѩ. Today it consists of only 30 letters.

A unique Cyrillic letters’ court is built in Pliska – the first Bulgarian capital (681-701). Different images and ornaments are depicted on each letter in the yard. They hint Bulgarian and Russian words, and show the beauty of the human and nature world united by the universal Christian symbols.

If we’ve grabbed your attention to the Cyrillic alphabet, here a good word for a start: “Здравей” (“Zdravei”), that is a nice way to tell somebody “Hello”.