| Excerpt |
Accepting Christianity represented the terminus point of the Bulgarian nation’s ethnogenesis, as it brought spiritual unity and the fundaments of Church canons into an ethnical and cultural diversity; at the same time, Christian moral fixed behavioural norms in society. Christianity served the new ideology of the Bulgarian sovereign and consolidated his authority over the Bulgarian grand boyars, replacing the old pagan war practices. The adoption of the old Slavonic as liturgical language, as a consequence of the missionarism of brothers Methodius and Cyril, created the most favourable conditions for cultural activity. Thus, the Bulgarian state, which became the First Bulgarian Tsardom during the reign of Simeon Veliki, became a true land of culture and literature, based on the old Slavonic. During the 9th and 10thcenturies the spread of the Slavic culture north of the Danube was made possible under the influence of the Bulgarian statehood and with the large participation of the Slavs within and outside the Carpathian arch |
