Happy Saints Cyril and Methodius Day!

The 24th of May is celebrated in Bulgaria as a National Holiday, honoring the two brothers, Saints Cyril and Methodius, and their creation of an alphabet for the Slavic tribes in Eastern Europe. Bulgarians also recognize the day as Bulgarian Education and Culture and Slavonic Literature Day and commemorate Bulgarian culture and literature and the alphabet on this day.

Cyril and Methodius were two brothers, born in Greece, who became Christian missionaries to the Slavic tribes in Eastern Europe. The brothers first created the Glagolitic alphabet, which transcribed the Old Church Slavonic spoken language into a written form. The Cyrillic alphabet, which incorporated both the Glagolitic and Greek alphabets, is said to have been created by a follower of St. Cyril and St. Methodius and named in honor of St. Cyril's work among the Slavic people. Cyrillic is now used in many Eastern European countries, including Russia and Bulgaria.

Having only had a few several Bulgarian language lessons so far, it has been interesting to compare the differences between Russian and Bulgarian and their respective alphabets, not to mention grammatical structure. For example, "my name is Monica" in Russian sounded like "menya nazavood Monica" (and meant, "they call me Monica") while in Bulgarian sounds like "az sum Monica" and means "I am Monica." So even sharing Cyrillic roots and alphabet, each language has it's own rules and grammatical structures.

So today, in honor of these Saints, as well as the Bulgarian holiday, I will work extra hard on my language homework and practice my pronunciation of the Bulgarian language, as Cyril and Methodius would have wanted.