Video from Drive Thru History with Dave Stotts
Methodius and Cyril: Apostles to the Slavs
"Methodius and Cyril: Apostles to the Slavs
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During the 9th century, two brothers named Methodius and Cyril grew up in Thessalonica as sons of a prominent Christian family. Because many Slavic people settled in Thessalonica, the brothers were familiar with the Slavic language from the region of present-day Russia and Eastern Europe.
Methodius, the older of the two brothers, was an important government official who would have spoken some Slavic as part of his job. Later, he grew tired of public affairs and retired to a Christian monastery. Similarly, Cyril abandoned civil service and moved to Constantinople to become a professor. In about 860, the Byzantine Church asked the brothers to travel as missionaries to what we know today as Ukraine.
Methodius and Cyril were dedicated to the idea of communicating in a people’s native language. Throughout their lives, they battled against those who saw value only in Greek or Latin. Before they left on their mission, Cyril constructed a written script for the Slavic language so he could translate the Bible and share the Gospel with the Slavic people. Cyril’s script is considered a precursor of Cyrillic, later developed by his students and named after him.
Before Methodius and Cyril, the Slavic people had no written language of their own. Through their Bible translation and missionary work, the brothers influenced the cultural development of all Slavs by developing the first alphabet for the region. They went on to disciple kings, convince scholars, and confront Mullahs.
So influential was the brothers’ work that centuries later, when the Slovakian people crafted a constitution, it read in part, “We, the Slovak People, bearing in mind the political and cultural heritage of our predecessors … mindful of the spiritual bequest of Cyril and Methodius … adopted this constitution.”
The Cyrillic script has now been used for various alphabets across Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Today, it’s estimated that over 250 million people use Cyrillic as the official alphabet for their national languages, with Russia accounting for about half of them. Now known as the “Apostles to the Slavs” and co-patron saints of Europe, the influence of Cyril and Methodius was vast, and their legacy lives on." video introduction.
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