Glagolitic Alley

Travelling from Roč towards Hum, you will come upon a clearing framed by forest. Scattered across it are the stone sculptures that make up Glagolitic Alley. It is the most significant monument to the Glagolitic script and to the Glagolitic priests who, in these parts between the 9th and the 19th centuries, fostered Croatian national consciousness.

By some theories Glagolitic is the oldest Slavic script, created in the middle of the 9th century on the model of the Greek alphabet. Along with the Latin script and Croatian Cyrillic it is considered a national script.

In its Latin texts the Catholic Church calls Glagolitic the Hieronymian letters, and Cyrillic the Cyrillian ones. By one theory, you see, Glagolitic is held to have been devised by St. Jerome himself.

Some hold that this Hieronymian theory was probably invented by the Glagolitic priests themselves. The Vatican forbade saying mass in the Croatian vernacular (Church Slavonic in its Croatian recension), so the Glagolitic priests attributed the origin of their script to a saint of Dalmatian roots who had translated the Bible into Latin. The ruse seems to have borne fruit, because in 1248 Pope Innocent IV granted the diocese of Senj permission to hold services in the Croatian vernacular.

Today the prevailing theory is that Glagolitic was devised by St. Cyril, and that his pupils later derived Cyrillic from it. Not only does that theory lack scientific grounding, it can quite easily be refuted on several levels. To begin with, Glagolitic has nothing whatever to do with the Greek alphabet, which served as the basis for deriving Cyrillic.

Looking into the question a little more deeply, you arrive at the realisation that Glagolitic dates back at least 700, and very probably 1,000, years before Cyril and Cyrillic.

Glagolitic also contained a number system in which the same letters of the script were used to write numbers up to 5999. The system reportedly worked perfectly. Later, when the Greeks began trading intensively with the Illyrians, they too introduced a similar number system into their script, but it had a series of shortcomings. Later still, when Cyrillic was derived from the Greek alphabet, it incorporated that number system, but worked out even less well.

Be that as it may, the Croats kept Glagolitic in use longer than any other people, and in 2014 the Republic of Croatia declared the art of reading, writing and printing Glagolitic an intangible cultural asset of Croatia.

The monument stands on a slope right beside the road. It begins with a sculpture called the Pillar of the Čakavski sabor (the Chakavian Assembly), after which the other sculptures, ten of them, are ranged in a semicircle.

If you are on your way to Hum, you are bound to see them.