A ceremonial procession marking May 24 — the Day of the Holy Brothers Cyril and Methodius, of the Bulgarian Alphabet, Education and Culture, and of Slav Letters — was held in Sofia on Sunday.

Among those taking part were President Iliana Iotova, National Assembly Chair Mihaela Dotsova, Bulgarian Patriarch and Metropolitan of Sofia Daniil, Sofia Mayor Vassil Terziev, members of parliament from various parliamentary groups, Deputy Prime Minister Ivo Hristov, Education and Science Minister Georgi Valchev, Culture Minister Evtim Miloshev, Innovation and Digital Transformation Minister Ivan Vasilev, Bulgarian National Television Director General Milena Milotinova, Bulgarian National Radio Director General Milen Mitev, and representatives of the academic community of Sofia University.

The celebrations began with a gathering outside the President’s Administration building. The procession moved along Sofia’s signature yellow paving blocks and passed the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia University, and the Sts Cyril and Methodius National Library before reaching the St Alexander Nevsky Cathedral.

Also joining the procession were the Representative Brass Band of the National Guards Unit, representatives of educational and cultural institutions, students, and members of the academic community, among others.

Later, Bulgarian Patriarch and Metropolitan of Sofia Daniil led a ceremonial water blessing outside the Sts Cyril and Methodius National Library, describing May 24 as both “an inherently Christian feast” and “a deeply Bulgarian holiday.”

He added that “May 24 is not simply a remembrance of historical events, but a celebration of the Bulgarian people’s own spiritual enlightenment.“ The Patriarch noted that this day gives Bulgarians an opportunity to draw inspiration and wisdom from the work of the creators of the Slav letters.

“We are not a tree without roots, but a people with an unshakable foundation in the faith of the holy brothers, in their wisdom, and in their love for God and neighbour,” Patriarch Daniil said.

He extended his greetings and blessings to teachers, university professors, students, and pupils.

“Today we are not commemorating distant historical events, but celebrating our own spiritual enlightenment. Today we celebrate the unique opportunity to create in our native language, to write and read using an alphabet created by holy men, and to engage in dialogue with other nations and cultures with dignity — not with a sense of inferiority, but with grateful awareness of our place within the millennia-old Christian literary and spiritual tradition,” he said.

Addresses were delivered by President Iliana Iotova, Sofia Mayor Vassil Terziev, and writer Angel Igov.

The celebrations concluded with a concert outside the St Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, featuring performances by students from schools across the capital.

On May 24, Bulgaria celebrates the Day of the Holy Brothers Cyril and Methodius, of the Bulgarian Alphabet, Education and Culture, and of Slavic Literature. The day is traditionally marked by paying floral tributes to monuments of St Cyril and St Methodius and festivities at schools, community centres and libraries across the country.

May 24 commemorates the work of the brothers Constantine-Cyril the Philosopher (827-869) and Methodius (815-885), Byzantine missionaries born in Salonica, who devised the Glagolitic in 855 AD or 862-863 AD. The Cyrillic, from which the modern Slav nations’ alphabets are derived, came 40-50 years later, c. 902-912 AD. Like the Roman script, it was adapted by scholars of the Preslav Literary School from the Greek alphabet, borrowing the latter’s all 24 characters and adding 24 new ones for specific Slav sounds.

The Slav alphabet was adopted in Bulgaria in 886 AD as a vehicle of enforcing Old Bulgarian as the single national and liturgical language. From Bulgaria, the script spread to other Slav countries and is now used by some 250 million people worldwide in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Serbia, North Macedonia, and Croatia. Romania also used the Cyrillic until the late 1870s. The alphabets of some non-Slav languages, like Kazakh, Mongolian, Ossetian, Tatar and Tajik, are also based on the Cyrillic script.

More than a third of the original 48 Cyrillic letters have been dropped in modern Bulgarian, which makes do with a 30-character alphabet (spelling was last reformed in 1945).

As Bulgaria joined the EU in 2007, the Cyrillic became the third official EU alphabet after the Latin and the Greek ones. On May 2, 2013, the European Central Bank put into circulation a new EUR 5 banknote on which, for the first time, the name of the single currency and the abbreviation ‘ECB’ (European Central Bank) are written in the Cyrillic alphabet.