Cyril and Methodius

The Bohemians are an ancient Christian people, converted in the 9th century, whose legacy includes good King Wenceslas and Jan Hus of the Hussites.

Their story begins, as so many do in the early European Christian world, with the saints Cyril and Methodius.

These brothers, who are considered equal to the apostles in the Orthodox Church, brought the glagolitic alphabet for writing out the Slavic language.

Sometime in the early 80s, they managed to convert the Duke of Bohemia, Borevoj, and his wife, Ludmilla.

I have read his commentaries on the Song of Songs and another great volume against Novatian, but besides these I have found no works of his.

Chapter 83 Methodius, bishop of Olympus in Lycia, and afterwards of Tyre, composed books against Porphyry, written in polished and logical style, also a banquet of the ten virgins, an excellent work on the resurrection, against Origin and on the Pyathenesia, and on free will, also against Origin.

He also wrote commentaries on Genesis and on the Song of Songs, and many others which are widely read.

At the end of the recent persecution, or as others affirm, in the reign of Decius and Valerianus, he was crowned with martyrdom at Chalceus in Greece.

Because he sent out the monks, Augustine of Canterbury, for example, to England to convert the Saxons.

The great undertaking of the church in the centuries that followed him, with Boniface and St. Patrick, Cyril and Methodius, with Augustine of Canterbury, with countless others, realistically with the decision of Gregory to send out a monks his priests to the darkest parts of Europe not just to the lands of the Western Empire that have been occupied by the Goths but beyond that to the unimaginable the vast stretches of territory beyond the confines of what used to be the Roman colony in Britain all the way into Eastern Europe into the lands beyond the Rhine.

This was dark, dark territory.

But Gregory knew that the future of the West, the future of the world, rested there with the conversion of those people.

We have three types of questions and it was all part of the survey.

First one, the whole campaign we created on the holiday for Cyril and Methodius.

These two brothers came to, it was...

These two brothers came to Czechia because they created a Slavic script.

It's normal.

And he wanted through them, like from... people know, we want them to introduce what they don't know.

So they knew everything about Sri Lanka.

They don't know, they knew that they created Slavic script and translate Bible and we through it wanted to share with them They do it because they believe in God.

And tell us, where are you a deacon?

I'm the deacon here at St. Cyril Methodius Catholic Church in Shiner, Texas.

Okay, yeah.

The big city of Shiner, a population of a little over 2,000, I think we're known more about our beer brewery, right?

He was quite a celebrity.

We've got so many of those paper newspapers yet in our possession.

And so the next day at 2 o'clock at St. Cyril Methodius, there was a banner that hung across the top of the church.

And actually in our book, it has the same name.

That island is where they found the relics of St. John the Baptist back in 2010, in the ruins of a medieval monastery.

They keep a fragment in the church of S.T.S. Cyril and Methodius here in town.

After

lunch, I climbed up to the Archaeological Museum on Han Krum Square.

The program is dense.

Films, theater, jazz, classical, all squeezed into 10 days across the amphitheater, the museum courtyard, and the church.

The church of S.T.S. Cyril and Methodius doubles as a concert hall during the festival, which feels right for a building that already holds a saint's relics.

I'm sitting on the roof terrace of my guest house now, listening to the wind come in off the sea.

...

Cyril and Methodius, um, you know, Moses and Aaron, you know?

Yeah.

Francis and Anthony-- I'm sorry, Francis and Dominic are-

At the end of the tenth century, Vladimir, the descendant of Oleg, and then Grand Prince of Russia, married the sister of the eastern emperor Basil, and became a convert to Christianity in 988.

The Slavonic translations of the scriptures written by Cyril and Methodius in the ninth century passed into Russia and became the national Bible of the Russians.

During the reign of his descendant, Yaroslav, the connection between the princely house of Russia and the Scandinavians of the west was close.

St. Olaf of Norway and the Russian prince had both married daughters of Olaf, king of Sweden.