What is the Old Cyrillic / Church Slavonic / Old
Bulgarian - large fonts pack to enable writting in Old
Cyrillic
Since some time. I've been interested into Bulgarian history as our
history is mostly related to the Slavnic Church history. The Old
Bulgarian letters (Old Slavonic) as Russians prefer to call it
nowadays 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 language in a sense that it's no
longer used for everyday communication among anyone.
However it's Church significance is enormous, every Slavonic
monastery's in morning and evening services as well as in the
Divine Liturgy has 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 created by 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 any profane word
in it. This is truly absolutely unique about the Old Cyrillic
language.
Here you can see how the original Glagholic alphabet looks
like:
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.