Church Slavonic

Church Slavonic is the sacred literary language of the Slavic Eastern Christians, descended from Old Church Slavonic created in the 860s by the brothers Cyril and Methodius for their mission to Great Moravia, where the Gospels and liturgy were translated into Slavic in the new Glagolitic alphabet. Expelled after 885, their disciples carried the tradition to the First Bulgarian Empire; the Preslav and Ohrid schools developed Cyrillic, which became the official script in 893.

By the twelfth century the language had absorbed local vernacular features and split into regional recensions. Printing came early, with the Glagolitic Missale Romanum of 1483 and Cyrillic liturgical books printed in Kraków in 1491.

In Russia the revised Synodal recension of the later seventeenth century served as the high literary language until secular Russian displaced it in the eighteenth century, leaving Church Slavonic to the liturgy.