Melentie Pandilovski on Fri, 13 Jun 1997 15:26:23 +0100 |
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Re: Syndicate: <nettime> The WYSIWYG Society (MEME 3.03) |
Since I work with with alternate history I would like to ask David S. Benhaum to contribute with these "facts"... They would certainly help me in my intentions of changing actual history. 4. SAILING TO BYZANTIUM.NET Latin and the Catholic church carried the essence of old Rome forward, loosely uniting the West with the Latin alphabet and, for awhile, Catholicism. Until the Protestant Reformation of Martin Luther, much of the West-- certainly its core, Britain, Spain, France and the German principalities-- swore spiritual allegiance to the same holy empire. They even went on joint military operations, the Crusades, and developed postal roads, a feudal harbinger of NATO and EMU. In the Byzantine empire, which subsumed the Balkans, Turkey, Romania, and today's Moldavia, Ukraine, and bits of Russia, a new alphabet, Cyrillic (created by the Bulgarian St. Cyril in the tenth century), emerged. Here the religion was Orthodox, and this, like the Catholic, eventually splintered into further forms (like Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox). The great divide between these two halves of the former Roman empire, strangely, is reappearing as the geographic division of a new Europe. The new border falls squarely between alphabets. Nations which use Latin letters are welcome to join the "ex-West." Those which use Cyrillic, the heirs of Byzantium, are excluded. They will ultimately come to form the true "ex-East." This line can be traced from the Baltic sea, where Estonia (Latin alphabet, Protestant and Catholic), meets Russia (Cyrillic, Russian Orthodox), southwards, subsuming Russia, Belorussia, Moldavia, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Macedonia into one block, loosely the same territory which Byzantium once occupied. 1. The Romanians and Moldavians in fact use the Latin Alphabet. This is also true for today's Turks and Albanians. 2. St. Cyril was Bulgarian as much as Martin Luther was French. In fact he was a Byzantinian missionary from the city of Thessaloniki. He was in charge of several missions, such as the Byzantine mission of converting the Khazar Kingdom into Christianity. 3. The alphabet created by the brothers St. Cyril and Methodius was the so called Glagolic. It was used throughout the Slavic world (Latin and Orthodox). In fact in Croatia it endured the longest (in some parts untill the 17th century). 4. St. Cyrill and Metodius's mission in the Slavic lands took place in Moravia (The Czech Republic) were they were invited by King Rostislav They dealt mostly with the translation of religious books into Slavic. They knew the Slavic language which was spoken around their home city (Thessaloniki - Solun) and based the Church Slavic on it. St. Cyrill died in 869 in Rome. He was buried in the temple of St. Clement - Bihop of Rome. His brother Metodij had died 885/6 in Moravia. 5. The Cyrilic alphabet (in honour of St. Cyril) was devised later. The authors are unknown. Some historians attribute the authorship of the Cyrillic alphabet to St. Clement of Ohrid who is also honoured for establishing the Slavic University in Ohrid in 893. 6. The key country is missing in this theory and it is of course Greece. Will Greece be excluded from the West (NATO & EU&bla.bla.)in order for the pieces of this theory to fill in, or will it have to adapt to Latin Letters in order for that not to happen. So much I have spotted... melentie Melentie Pandilovski assistant director Soros Center for Contemporary Arts - Skopje Ruzveltova 34 91000 Skopje, Republic of Macedonia Tel/Fax: 389.91.361.855 e-mail: mpandil@soros.org.mk scca@soros.org.mk http://www.soros.org.mk --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@icf.de and "info nettime" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner@icf.de