It is well established that the Cyrillic alphabet originated from the Greek script in the late ninth century. Yet the relationship between the two did not end with this moment of creation: Greek continued to influence the development of Cyrillic for centuries, particularly in the South Slavic cultural sphere, where this interaction remained active at least until the fifteenth century. Despite the prolonged and multifaceted interaction, the genetic and developmental relationships linking Greek and Cyrillic have yet to be subjected to systematic scholarly investigation. An ongoing international research project, funded by the Bulgarian National Science Fund (FNI), aims to fill this gap by examining the evolution of the Cyrillic script as attested in South Slavic manuscript sources from the tenth to the fourteenth century. Particular attention is also given to comparative analysis with epigraphic material. The project brings together philologists, paleographers, and computer scientists in a collaborative, interdisciplinary framework. As part of this research, a digital tool (CyPaT) has been developed to support the morphological description and analysis of handwritten letterforms. This tool, which is now being made available to the scholarly community, enables a more systematic and replicable approach to the classification of Cyrillic scripts.
The Cyrillic script, created by the disciples of Saints Cyril and Methodius at the end of the 9th century for the Bulgarian Church and Empire, has developed across space and time up to the present day. Its origin and early evolution, particularly in the South Slavic regions, took place in dialogue with the Greek alphabet….
The emergence of a new script for the Slavic language, developed within the court of Simeon of Bulgaria under the influence of the elegant and hieratic forms of the Greek majuscule, and further refined in a court scriptorium that regulated its use, represented only the initial phase in the evolution of a series of Cyrillic…
This part of the session will present how leading-edge technologies in computer vision (CV) and artificial intelligence (AI) can be applied to digitised images of Cyrillic manuscripts, enabling in-depth description of their physical and visual attributes, structured management of codicological and palaeographical datasets, advanced computational processing such as feature extraction and pattern recognition, effective management…
This study examines the transition from the de visu study of Cyrillic manuscripts to their analysis within a digital and analytical framework, a transformation that continues to pose primarily methodological challenges, as it requires the adaptation of both material evidence and descriptive practices. The CyPaT (Cyrillic Paleographic Toolkit) software addresses these challenges by providing analytical…