"Cyrillic Alphabet" mask (1)

Az Buki Vedi / Glagol’ Dobro Jest / Zhivot Zemlja Izhe

The Cyrillic alphabet is unusual and beautiful, but do we understand the full meaning of it? We know the meaning of the word “dobro”, we know that from “vedi” Russian language got “vedat” (know), “videt” (see), and with “glagol” we can “glagolit” (speak). Letters of the Cyrillic alphabet, one of the two scripts in which all literary monuments of the Old Slavonic were written, formed various modern Slavic alphabets. “Cyrillic” was “invented by Cyril”, but most of monuments of that epoch have not reached us, since in the 10th century already two alphabets were known: the Cyrillic and the Glagolitic scripts. We talked about the first 9 old letters that we know of. The letters are written in Russian teratological style that formed between the 9th and 14th centuries in parallel with the Byzantine style (from the Greek teras, meaning “monster” or “marvel”, and logos, meaning “the study of”). Presumably this style was born within the walls of a medieval Novgorod – a liberal and scientific mecca, spreading later across other Russian lands.