Was it Cyril’s Fault or Ryan’s? – Greg and Mandy's Travels

During the 9th century, two Byzantine theologians and brothers, Cyril and Methodious worked out a set of symbols to be able to denote all of the sounds in the Slavic languages, in order to put the Bible into Slavic form. Good intention, bad execution. I’ve ranted on about this before, so I won’t dwell on it, but the real problem was that they didn’t use the Latin characters where one existed, and then just add unique characters for the other sounds. No, that would have made life too simple, so they just rearranged everything.

Consequently:

The sound s is written as c

The sound v is written as b

The sound n is written as h

The sound r is written as p

And so on.

Then there are all the other symbols used to refer to complex sounds such as tse, and che which are completely new.

I always thought that the Cyrillic alphabet was developed for Russia, but today they corrected me. They informed me that it was originally developed in Bulgaria for the Moldovan language, but when the Moldovan ruler took a look at it, he decided to go with Latin script. Wise man. However, the Bulgarians didn’t want the effort to go to waste, so they adopted it. Later on, Russia got in on the act too.

So, today, Bulgaria, Russia and about 250 million people in the Russian sphere use the Cyrillic alphabet. In fact, Stalin made it compulsory in all Soviet countries, and you know what happened if you defied Stalin.

Trouble is, Ryan also got in on the act. In a completely unrelated set of circumstances, Christopher Ryan, an Irishman founded a cut price airline in 1984, and called it Ryanair. By 2016, Ryanair was the largest European airline by scheduled passengers flown, and carried more international passengers than any other airline, with over 400 aircraft. They pioneered the low-cost airline in Europe, and one of the initiatives they introduced were flights from UK and Ireland to eastern European countries without existing direct flights, such as Bulgaria.

So now you have large number of Brits flooding the Cyrillic-using Bulgaria. What to do? On one hand the tourist dollar is an amazing boon. On the other hand, why should they change. Money always wins out, so there have been enormous changes. English is now pretty much the second language of anybody young at heart, and signs are pretty much bi-lingual. The other change is the huge ramp up of tourist services, including free walking tours of the city, and that’s where we fitted in this morning.

Dino led a fun, fact filled walking tour of the highlights of the old city, for just on two hours. Most of the walking tours we’ve been on have lasted 2.5-3.0 hours, so this one seemed short, but it covered the main bases.

We uncovered a few surprising things on our ramble. They say that Sofia was inhabited about 5000BC, so it’s very old. There are Roman ruins from the first century everywhere. The Soviets just poured concrete into them when they put up their concrete blocks, but now every construction is hampered by miles of ruins. The subway took 30 years to build. So there are modern layers, soviet layers, Ottoman layers, Byzantine layers, Roman layers. One big wedding cake.

Because of the long history, and therefore the multiple uses buildings have been put to, Dino took a swipe at his city, saying that if you want to go to the Roman baths, you visit the museum. If you want to see the Roman ruins, you go to the subway, and if you want to see the National Gallery, you go to the King’s Palace.

Sofia was one of the oases on the trade route to western Europe as it was built over hot springs, and was a bit of a stopping off point for the caravans. Before breakfast there were queues of guys pulling up in their cars at the public taps, opening their car boots, and unloading large plastic bottles to be filled and carted away, as its very drinkable.

A fascinating city, with lots of history and culture. Slightly cheaper than Australia. The Big Mac index is AU$7.20.