Kirill and Mefodii

By Audra Yoder

Mural painting of Cyril & Methodius by Zahari Zograf (1810–1853)
[Troyan Monastery, Bulgaria]

I. A Tale of Four Empires

Central and southeastern Europe in the ninth century was a convoluted mess. (Actually, I have difficulty recalling a period when southeastern Europe wasn’t hopelessly confusing. To me, it still is.)

Anyway, the Byzantine Empire was in the middle of a resurgence under the Macedonian dynasty. Its emperors were able politicians for once, arts and culture were flourishing after the iconoclastic controversy had died down, and the empire was in the process of winning back lands it had lost to Muslim Arab incursions.

Meanwhile, north of Byzantium, and taking up rather more territory, the Khazar kaganate was at its zenith. The Khazars controlled the most powerful steppe empire of the period, and ran one of the most successful trading conglomerates in the medieval world. The Khazars were a Turkic people; interestingly, pretty much all their high leadership converted to Ashkenazy Judaism at the beginning of the ninth century, and following this, the kaganate became one of the earliest states to practice religious toleration: under their leadership, Christians, Muslims, and Jews all lived together in peace.

Meanwhile, further north still, an amorphous mass of East Slavic tribes was in the process of transforming itself into something that would ultimately become Russia. The semi-legendary Norse princeling Rurik settled in Novgorod in 862, and the Rurikid dynasty he founded would rule Rus′, and later Muscovy, until the early seventeenth century. [1] Rurik’s descendant prince Oleg would seize Kiev in 878, and open up the Black Sea for East Slavic trade.

Meanwhile, in Central Europe, the West Slavic state of Great Moravia was in full swing. Under rulers Rastislav and Svatopulk I, Moravia achieved its greatest geographic size in the ninth century, controlling Bohemian, Hungarian, Polish, and Czech territories. This little empire was busily trying to disentangle itself from the more powerful Germanic and Frankish kings to its west.

Back in Byzantium, or more specifically, in the Greek city of Thessalonica, two brothers, Constantine and Michael, lost their father when Constantine was only fourteen. The boys came under the protection of a powerful Byzantine official, who provided them with a first-rate education.

Constantine, who would take the name Cyril upon becoming a monk, was ordained to the priesthood after he completed his education, and because of his knowledge of Hebrew and Arabic, was sent over to debate the concept of the Trinity with Muslim theologians. He became the unofficial head of Byzantine interfaith relations, engaging in fierce polemics with the Jewish aristocracy of the Khazar kaganate. Cyril even traveled to Khazaria in an attempt to stop the spread of Judaism there, but his mission failed, and the kagan subsequently imposed that religion on the entire population.

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Street Scenes

Outside the metro,
the young man stands singing into a microphone
and playing a guitar in the cold.
A crowd gathers in a semicircle;
the young girls sing along
with something like joy in their eyes.

A few steps away,
a man sits on the bottom steps of the theater.
Beside him is a cane
and before him are a few coins on the ground.
With a black hat,
he quietly wipes the blood from his face.

Across the perekhod,
outside the "Kofe Khaus,"
a petite woman kneels on the sidewalk,
a dirty hood veiling her face.
Bowing, she crosses herself
and mumbles a blessing for those who pass by.

Near the newspaper vendor and the cellphone booth
an old man stands
with a small, grey goat,
which is wearing a coat
and nibbling something
out of a burlap bag.

Adventures in Language Learning

Stores a block from our apartment
where I do most of our shopping.

Русский язык - ето мне тёмный лес.*

Living in a foreign country while beginning to learn its language tends to produce awkward and humorous situations.  At least this has been the case for me over the past month of living in Moscow and beginning to study Russian.

My frequent shopping trips (I go to the grocery store nearly every day) occasion my primary interaction with Russians and, frequently, communication challenges.  Take today's trip to the nearby Citimarket, for example: I wanted to buy q-tips, and although I do not know how to say "q-tip" in Russian, I figured I would be able to find them on the shelf.  I made several circuits around the little shop, searching fruitlessly for the q-tips, picking up tissues and dish soap in an effort to seem as nonchalant as possible, before I planted myself in front of the beauty product section, scanning the shelves to no avail.  

After a few minutes, a helpful store clerk comes up to me to see if I need help finding anything (at least that is what I assume she said).  Since I have no idea how to explain what I'm looking for, I say, "I'm sorry, I don't know the word in Russian."

She says something I don't understand, but which I take to be an offer to help anyway.  So I say, "It's small...for my wife," and trace the shape of a q-tip with my fingers.

She points to some tweezers.

"No," I say.  Then I make an eye-wiping gesture to indicate the intended use of the q-tips.

I buy the lion's share of our groceries
at the Sugar Lion Supermarket.

She says something about glasses, and I say no, and then she makes a motion like she's applying mascara, and I say no again.  "I'm sorry," I say.

"One second," she says, and goes to wait on another customer.  While she's gone, I make a last ditch effort to find the q-tips on my own--and I find them!  They are labeled as "cotton buds."

Triumphant, I return to the checkout counter: "Here! This!"

A look of recognition comes to her face, and she says something else which I don't understand, and mimes using the q-tip to clean around her eyes and in her ears.  

I ask, "What you say in Russian?"

"Vatnaia palochka," she says.

"Vatnaia palochka," I repeat, "Vatnaia palochka."  I pay for my things, and thank her.

***

I don't know how Russians take my pathetic attempts at communicating in Russian, but I quite enjoy the oddities of usage sometimes occasioned by Russians speaking English.  Yesterday, for example, I was trying to buy a coat in a shop when a clerk who could speak English came to my rescue.  I wanted a smaller size of coat than was on the rack, but wasn't succeeding in explaining this in Russian.  Happily, I did succeed in English, and she brought one out for me.  

I tried on the coat in front of a mirror.

"It's your coat," she exclaimed, "Gorgeous!"

*"Russian is a dark forest to me."  "It's a dark forest to me" is the linguistic equivalent of the English expression, "It's Greek to me."

Things I Can See From Our Apartment

The view from our apartment.

Our apartment is on the fifth floor of a massive apartment building.  The building is built as two U-shaped sections (nine stories) joined together by a central section (fourteen stories), which from the air would look something like this:  ]—[.  Our apartment looks out onto a courtyard formed by the “bottom” of our U, the central section, and the mirror side of the other U.

In the courtyard are a number of deciduous trees, the largest of which is a birch whose upper branches must reach nearly 25 meters.  Bare now, their black branches are flecked with snow, and stand out against the beige color of the apartment building and the white of the snow on the ground.  The trees stand silent and many birds rest in their branches.

Flocks of pigeons dominate the bird population of our courtyard: now perching in the branches of a tree, their feathers puffed against the cold; now looking sideways at me from the ledge outside the kitchen window; now soaring up above the roof of the building; now flocking around some seeds someone has scattered on the snow.  There are other birds as well:  Hooded crows, looking as if they are wrapped in a grey cloak, and sparrows and other small birds.

At the foot of the trees, about 70 or 80 small, rectangular sheds made of corrugated metal set in something roughly resembling rows.  They are not spaced evenly, and some аре at odd angles.  The sheds are just large enough to squeeze a sedan inside, and it seems that serving as garages is their primary purpose.  They have hand-painted red numbers on their front doors, and more than a foot of white snow on their roofs.

A green chain-link fence marks off an area between some of the sheds as a place where people exercise their dogs.  When it is very cold, the little toy dogs wear coats.  Yesterday, I saw a German Shepherd jumping back and forth over a section of wooden fence (also painted green) in the dog park.

In the very center of the courtyard are two dumpsters and several small receptacles for trash.  People, including me, often toss a small bag of trash into these upon leaving their apartment, and orange-coated workers push little carts with trash from the apartments to the dumpsters.  I also see people stop at the dumpster and poke around for interesting things; yesterday a woman carried away a large piece of wood, painted green.

Our windows face to the southwest.  On clear days, we can see part of the enormous main building of the Lomonosov Moscow State University, or MГУ, for short.  Built on Sparrow Hills, it is the largest of the “Seven Sisters” (or, as they are known in Russian, “Stalin’s high-rises”); it was the tallest building in Europe until 1990.  At night, the entire structure is lit up to rather stunning effect.

Across the street from our apartment is a ballet school.  Through two large windows on the second story, you can see young ballerinas practicing their poses.  Wearing black leotards, they gracefully raise their arms.