Cyrillic script

The Cyrillic script is a writing system employed across Eurasia for numerous languages. It serves as the official national script in countries spanning Southeastern Europe, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia, North Asia, and East Asia, including those with Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian, and Iranic language families, and it is also utilized for many minority languages. By 2019, roughly 250 million people in Eurasia used Cyrillic for their national languages, with Russia representing about half of that total. Following Bulgaria's entry into the European Union in 2007, Cyrillic became the EU's third official script, after Latin and Greek.

The script's name honors Saint Cyril, though it was not created by Cyril and Methodius themselves. Instead, their followers in Bulgaria developed it, making the name a tribute rather than a claim of authorship. The Early Cyrillic alphabet was devised in the late 9th to early 10th century AD (circa 893–900 AD) at the Preslav Literary School in the First Bulgarian Empire, under Tsar Simeon I the Great. Scholars there, including Clement of Ohrid, Naum of Preslav, Constantine of Preslav, Joan Ekzarh, Chernorizets Hrabar, and others—disciples of the Byzantine brothers Cyril and Methodius, who had earlier created the Glagolitic script—likely created it. Unlike the Ohrid scholars, those at Preslav relied more heavily on Greek models, quickly adapting Greek uncial letters to Slavic needs and abandoning Glagolitic. The resulting alphabet combined Greek uncial letters with ligatures and consonants from Glagolitic for sounds absent in Greek. Paul Cubberley suggests that while Cyril may have formalized Glagolitic, his students in Bulgaria under Simeon I developed Cyrillic from Greek letters in the 890s for church books.

The script spread among other Slavic peoples and non-Slavic Romanians. The earliest datable Cyrillic inscriptions appear in the Preslav area, including the medieval city itself, the Patleina Monastery, the Ravna Monastery, and the Varna Monastery, all in present-day Shumen Province. Cyrillic became the basis for alphabets in various languages across Orthodox Church-dominated Eastern Europe, including both Slavic and non-Slavic tongues like Romanian (used until the 1860s). For centuries, Catholic and Muslim Slavs also used it.