I decided to publish the following article by historian Eduard Chmelár about Cyril and Methodius, which he posted on his Facebook page. Since I have been following Mr. Chmelár for quite a long time and know him well, I know that he also has several negative and controversial qualities, yet this article was very successful – hats off to him.
Well, so, dear children, let's recall the historical facts without myths and emotions, so that we know what we are actually celebrating:
Prince Rastislav decided to break free from the influence of the East Frankish Empire and turned to Pope Nicholas I with a request for an independent ecclesiastical province. However, the Pope refused, so the Great Moravian ruler turned to the Byzantine Emperor Michael III. Contrary to our expectations, he was a cruel and narrow-minded ruler, and at the moment when the embassy arrived, he was probably also drunk. He also refused the request to send a high ecclesiastical dignitary. However, the Patriarch of Constantinople and the most prominent Byzantine scholar, Photios, advised the emperor to send someone less important to Great Moravia, saying that he would lose nothing by doing so and would explore the situation in this part of Europe. He suggested two insignificant monks who had previously proven themselves in diplomatic missions. Michael III did not care, paid almost no attention to their mission, and perhaps was not even sober when he signed their mandate, which was not missionary but diplomatic.
Despite the romantic images, both brothers were received with great embarrassment. They offered the local inhabitants a new script, although from the findings in Bojná we know that our ancestors already knew writing, they wrote in Latin. They offered them a new language, which, however, was not based on the dialects spoken at that time by the Slavs in Nitra or Moravia – the basis of Old Church Slavonic was the South Slavic dialects from the vicinity of Thessaloniki. So Old Church Slavonic was not "our language" that Rastislav demanded. And finally, they confused them with the Orthodox religion, although the local Christian community, after the Irish and Bavarian missions, was accustomed to Western Christianity. However, the greatest resistance was caused by the introduction of new rules of social life. Constantine and Methodius proceeded unusually harshly, forbidding previous customs and imposing cruel punishments for non-compliance with these prohibitions. The previous history of Old Slovakia has been presented in an extremely distorted way, at least in the sense that before the Cyril and Methodius mission there was no culture in our territory, as if Christianity had brought it. The fact is, however, that Christianization disrupted the ancient Slavic culture that had been developing in Slovakia for several centuries. Christian missionaries ordered the felling of sacred groves, the destruction of wooden statues and Old Slavic shrines, and indeed the liquidation of any monuments to the original civilization. The fact that Old Slavic customs had deep roots here is evidenced not only by the fiasco of the Cyril and Methodius legal regulations, but also by the extraordinary harshness with which the new Christian power proceeded against the adherents of the original cults. As late as the 11th century, professing the religion of the Slavs was punishable by death, confiscation of property, or sale into slavery.
All this testifies to the fact that the retreat of Old Slavonic customs was not as rapid and unambiguous as classical historiography describes, and we should pay more attention to the original culture of our ancestors. In some places, revolts against the introduction of Christian rules even broke out, but they were not extensive. The Cyril and Methodius mission ended in a fiasco after a few years. Svatopluk, who in his politics apparently adhered to the motto "Make Great Moravia Great Again", expanded his power by promising protection of the original Slavic cults. Slovakia was fully Christianized by force only under the reign of the first Hungarian king Stephen I.
The Cyril and Methodius myth was born at the dawn of the Slovak national movement. Unlike the Czechs, Poles, or Croats, we could not rely on the tradition of a medieval kingdom, nor could we claim for propaganda reasons that we were Christianized by Hungarians. Thus, the first revivalists invented the myth of the brothers from Thessaloniki who brought us faith, writing, and education. This is as much nonsense as similar revivalist myths about Slovak as the mother of all languages, about the Hungarian oligarch Matúš Čák of Trenčín as the ruler of Slovaks, and similar absurdities that the "national revivalists" of the time invented. And so we continue to live here, happily deceiving ourselves… But Martin Benka's painting is impressive.
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Related links:
Did the Slavs commit mass suicides during the Christianization process? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdsEximOezo
Cyril and Methodius brought violence and decline to the Slavs