Old Church Slavonic, also known as Old Bulgarian or Old Macedonian, was the first literary Slavic language, based on the old Slavic dialect of the Thessalonica region, employed by the 9th century Byzantine Greek missionaries, Saints Cyril and Methodius, who used it for translation of the Bible and other Ancient Greek ecclesiastical texts, and for some of their own writings. It played a great role in the history of Slavic languages and served as a...
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Old Church Slavonic, also known as Old Bulgarian or Old Macedonian, was the first literary Slavic language, based on the old Slavic dialect of the Thessalonica region, employed by the 9th century Byzantine Greek missionaries, Saints Cyril and Methodius, who used it for translation of the Bible and other Ancient Greek ecclesiastical texts, and for some of their own writings. It played a great role in the history of Slavic languages and served as a basis and model for later Church Slavonic traditions, where Church Slavonic is used as a liturgical language to this day by some Orthodox and Greek-Catholic Churches of the Slavic peoples.
The language was standardized for the mission of the two apostles to Great Moravia in 863 (see Glagolitic alphabet for details). For that purpose, Cyril and his brother Methodius first codified Old Church Slavonic from the Southern Slavic dialect spoken in the hinterland of Thessalonica, in the region of Macedonia (Ѳессалонїка; in Old Church Slavonic,...
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