page_title: Old Church Slavonic
section_title: Great Moravia
hierarchical_section_title: Old Church Slavonic / Basis and local influences / Great Moravia
context_page_description: Old Church Slavonic or Old Slavonic, also known as Old Church Slavic, Old Slavic, and was the first Slavic literary language. It is also referred to as Paleo-Slavic or Palaeo-Slavic, not to be confused with Proto-Slavic. It is often abbreviated to OCS.
  Historians credit the 9th-century Byzantine missionaries Saints Cyril and Methodius with standardizing the language and using it in translating the Bible and other Ancient Greek ecclesiastical texts as part of the Christianization of the Slavs.
  It is thought to have been based primarily on the dialect of the 9th-century Byzantine Slavs living in the Province of Thessalonica.
  Old Church Slavonic played an important role in the history of the Slavic languages and served as a basis and model for later Church Slavonic traditions, and some Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholic churches use this later Church Slavonic as a liturgical language to this day.
  As the oldest attested Slavic language, OCS provides important evidence for the features of Proto-Slavic, the reconstructed common ancestor of all Slavic languages.
context_section_description: The language was standardized for the first time by the mission of the two apostles to Great Moravia from 863. The manuscripts of the Moravian recension are therefore the earliest dated of the OCS recensions. The recension takes its name from the Slavic state of Great Moravia which existed in Central Europe during the 9th century on the territory of today's western Slovakia and Czech Republic.
caption: The Introduction of the Slavonic Liturgy (1912), by Alphonse Mucha, The Slav Epic
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