Posts Tagged ‘What is the Old Cyrillic / Church Slavonic / Old Bulgarian – large fonts pack to enable writting in Old Cyrillic’

What is the Old Cyrillic / Church Slavonic / Old Bulgarian – large fonts pack to enable writting in Old Cyrillic

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010

Since some time. I’ve been interested into Bulgarian history as our history is mostly relatedto the Slavnic Church history. The Old Bulgarian letters (Old Slavonic) as Russians prefer to call itnowadays is a real interesting and unique type of letter system that our ancient ancestors used.
This typing letter and it’s books is still in use in Bulgarian, Serbia, Russia, Macedonia mostly in
the Monasteries or on places that has to do with old Slavonic history.
The Old Church Slavonic (Glagolhic Alphabet) as it’s also called by historians is actually a dead languagein a sense that it’s no longer used for everyday communication among anyone.
However it’s Church significanceis enormous, every Slavonic monastery’s in morning and evening services as well as in the Divine Liturgyhas a extensive readings from the old liturgical books which are written in Church Slavonic.
The Church Slavonic (Old Cyrillic language) is considered a God inspired language. The language was createdby the Saint brothers Cyril and Methodius
This days this two saints are as a patron saints of most of the Slavonic nationalities in the world,they’re also highly venerated in Bulgaria, Serbia, Macedonia, Russia, Ukraine etc. as enlighteners of the slavonic nations.
What is really interesting about Church Slavonic is that it’s maybe the only language in the world that doesn’t have anyprofane word in it. This is truly absolutely unique about the Old Cyrillic language.

Here you can see how the original Glagholic alphabet looks like:

Old Church Slavonic alphabet, Glagolhic alphabet, Old bulgarian alphabet, old cyrillic alphabet

At the present days the old cyrllic is of interest mostly to religious Eastern Orthodox Christian people with a known slavonic lineageor to history researchers and anthropologists.

When I was in Pomorie’s Monastery I tried reading from the liturgical books but I was having serious difficulties, making mistakes while reading on almost every word. So I have to tell you Old Bulgarian is not easy to be red or pronounce.
Some Christian Orthodox believers say that praying in Church Slavonic language has a higher prayer power since it is a language which was not touched by modern human profanity. This people claim that reading religious texts or the Holy Bible in Church Slavonic grants a person more grace than usually received by reading the Holy Scriptures, the Saint Livings or the Liturgical texts in modern languages like for instance modern bulgarian.
Many time among the clergy in the Bulgarian Orthodox Church Holy Synod disputes has emerged concerning the topic of language reformation in the Bulgarian Orthodox Church.
The risen dispute which is still pendant questions should the Bulgarian Orthodox Church keep part of it’s reading of the old slavonic book texts in the Churches or monasteries or the Old Church Slavonic should be completely abandoned and the Divine Liturgy service and the holy book readings in the church be in modern Bulgarian language.
My personal opinion is that part of the Church Slavonic readings should be kept as they’re are the present moment in the Church, since they have a direct relation to our history and traditions as a Bulgarian nation.
If the topic has already become interesting to you I advice you read a bit further About Old Church Slavonic here

Some of the prepared electronic documents like pdf or doc with a sacred old bulgarian texts are still in Church slavonic, some doesn’t have a complete translation in modern bulgarian. So every now and then I believe Orthodox Priests, clergy men layman as well as history researches need to open documents written in Church slavonic on their Personal Computers.
Since normally most of the operating systems like MS Windows and Linux, Mac OS X etc. doesn’t support Church Slavonic it’s really important that the necessery fonts are installed the respective computer architecture OS.
In my attempt to simplify the installation of the necessery FONT files for opening Church Slavonic (Old Cyrillic) documents I’ve looked online and downloaded a number of freeware .TTF as well as other fonts that allows visualization of Church Slavonic letters on your PC.
The old cyrillic fonts for your PC can be obtained font by font from here .
An archive of the Complete Large Old Cyrillic / Church Slavonic fonts can be obtained from here
To compile the above old cyrillic fonts pack I have used mostly the following online source:

irmologion.ru – here you can download many old slavonic fonts .
U+fonts Cyrillic OCS on (WAZU JAPAN’s Gallery of Unicode Fonts) .
David Zbiral’s free Old Cyrillic font for Windows and Mac Cyrillic page

You can find a complete list of the old church slavonic cyrillic fonts included with the up-mentioned pack here

I hope this fonts pack would be helpful to somebody out there. Any feedback suggestions for future improve of the pack are very welcome.