The Cyrillic alphabet — the foundation of the Bulgarian culture and identity

The Cyrillic alphabet may be something new to the European Union, but it's a significant part of Europe's medieval history. Dating back to the time of the First Bulgarian Kingdom, the Cyrillic alphabet has been the main instrument of the religious and thus the political independence of the Bulgarians. While European Christianity had already been split between Catholicism and Orthodoxy, Bulgaria was just officially converted to Christianity. As a new character on this restless religious stage, Bulgaria's strategy was to keep its political and national identity and independence but to do that it needed to overcome the ambitions of both Rome and the Byzantine empire of politically aligning it through Catholicism or Orthodox Christianity.

After choosing to join the Orthodox and successfully secured an independent Bulgarian Church, Khan Boris I needed an instrument with which to facilitate the introduction of the new religion that is official for everyone. The best way to do that was through language. The task of creating an alphabet for the Slavic language was undertaken by two brothers from Thessaloniki — Cyril and Methodius, who together with their followers not only created the first alphabet of the Slavonic language, nowadays known as Glagolitsa, but also laid the grounds of the Slavonic religious and secular literature and culture. Based on the tradition laid by the Glagolitsa and on the use of the Latin and the Greek scripts on the Balkans since Antiquity, a new kind of alphabet was created in the literary centers of the First Bulgarian Kingdom — the Cyrillic alphabet, which was a modification of the Byzantine script in capital letters — the so called Uncial, adapted to the phonetics of the Bulgarian language. For about a century both the Cyrillic and the Glagolic alphabet had been used but eventually the Cyrillic alphabet prevailed due to its suitability and spread among the Slavonic counties and beyond. Nowadays it's the official alphabet of many of the Slavonic countries such as Bulgaria, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Serbia, Macedonia, and also a few non-Slavonic countries as Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kirgizstan, Tajikistan and even Mongolia.
In 2007, with the accession of Bulgaria to the European Union, the Cyrillic alphabet became one of the three official alphabets of EU and soon we can expect it to make its debut on the Euro banknote next to the Latin and Greek inscriptions.