| Abstract | Paper -a:
St Naum of Ohrid is one of the saints whose cult is attested as early as the 10th century among the Orthodox Slavs in Southeastern Europe. Although his Life, quite unusual for this genre, came to us only in a late manuscript of the early 16th century, it was written in Old Bulgarian language very soon after his death (on 23.12.910), and undoubtedly contains important and reliable data. Evidence of this is the text of the work, which explicitly mentions that its author was its contemporary, who, however, knows little about the life of Naum from himself and was encouraged to write the Life by a bishop who was the successor of the episcopate of the closest ally of St Naum - St Kliment (died in 916). Unfortunately, this brief work gives only a cursory idea of the saint. A complete picture of him and the cult of him in its various dimensions is formed by hagiographic works, originating later on the basis of unknown sources. They are written between 11th and 14th century by the archbishops of Ohrid - Greeks. The cult of St Naum is formed initially in the First Bulgarian Kingdom among the Bulgarian Slavs. Later, the complicated historical fate of the Bulgarians and the dependence of the Bulgarian Church on the Constantinople Patriarchate and the functioning of the Archbishopric of Ohrid (from 11th century to 1767) contributed to spreading the cult of St Naum among different ethnic groups and the Bulgarian diaspora in different regions of the Balkans, now included in various states. Thus today this cult in its various dimensions – such as church feast, images, public celebrations, folklore tales and legends - has actually become a symbol of cultural cohesion on the Balkan Peninsula. It is the facts associated with this process that are being analyzed in the report.
Paper -b:
'God, rise Your Church in majority and unite all in unanimity'. This sentence of the dying prayer of St Cyril has always been interpreted as a spiritual testament of the saint. It was one of the grounds for Pope John Paul II to proclaim him and his brother St Methodius Patron Saints of Europe together with St Benedict of Nursia. With his apostolic letter of 31 December 1980 John Paul II restored the European cultural and religious entirety and made the apostles of the Slavs symbols of 'overcoming in Europe and the world of everything that divides the Churches, nations and peoples'.
This act is the crest of a long tradition of veneration the two saints among the Slavs, beginning from the 9th century. Thereafter the ideologies of all Slavic nations have been using often the Cyrillo-Methodian tradition as a sign of its national identity. The paper presents some medieval examples of this phenomenon, tracking the changes of the idea. Described by the Old Bulgarian writers (9th – 10th c.) and by the sources, related with the papal curia as an all-Slav achievement, the work of Sts Cyril and Methodius obtains different 'national' characteristics in the course of time. They have been venerated as teachers and confessors of Bulgarians, Moravians, Czechs, and Poles and the present-day considers them as part of the universal cultural patrimony.
Paper -c:
The present work examines a passage from the Vita of St. Cyril which is the oldest Bulgarian hagiographic work written at the end of the 9th century and tells of the pre-Christian cult of the oak. The main focus is on the historic clash between paganism and Christianity and on the difference and incompatibility of cultural systems.
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