Today, Bulgarians celebrate St Cyril and Methodius Day as a national holiday on 24 May (also known as the Day of Bulgarian Culture or the Cyrillic Alphabet Day). In its modern version, standardised after the last spelling reform in 1945, it’s very similar to the Russian Cyrillic alphabet. Their disciples devised the Cyrillic alphabet (based on Greek and Glagolitic) in which Bulgarian has been written ever since. The central figures in the development of the Slavic literary language were Saints Cyril and Methodius, Byzantine Orthodox missionaries who invented the Glagolitic alphabet around 863 AD and used it to translate Greek liturgical texts into Old Church Slavonic. Old Bulgarian (also known as Old Church Slavonic) was the first Slavic language recorded in written form, in religious literature from the 9th century. Their place was partially filled by Russian words, as Russian has influenced Bulgarian through both Bulgaria’s ties with the Orthodox Church and long-standing cultural ties with Russia. During the 19th century, many of the loanwords from Turkish were eliminated from the language. In addition, numerous Turkish words entered the Bulgarian vocabulary during five centuries of Ottoman rule. These foreign influences explain many of its grammatical features – for example, the lack of noun cases, which sets Bulgarian (and Macedonian) apart from the other Slavic languages. However, it also shows similarities with the nonSlavic languages in the so-called Balkan linguistic union (Romanian, Albanian and Greek), as a result of multilingualism and interaction among the Balkan nations. As a member of the South Slavic group of languages, Bulgarian has Macedonian and Serbian as its closest relatives. Together with their language, they were assimilated by the local Slavs, who had crossed the Danube and settled in the peninsula at the start of the 6th century. It’s one of a handful of words remaining in Bulgarian from the language of the Bulgars, a Turkic people who invaded the eastern Balkans in the late 7th century. Surprisingly, the name of the oldest South Slavic literary language, Bulgarian (български buhl
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