As part of an anti-Valentine's Day gesture, this morning I wanted to know which saint's day is today. The first webpage I consulted had a bewildering long list of saints for each day, with variations for the different orthodoxies and many of them bouncing around like Easter does so that there isn't a simple correspondence of one saint to one date. Happily, I next found this page, which makes it all very simple (perhaps at the cost of accuracy — I can't tell — but I don't really care that much).

It tells me that today is St Apollonia's Day. Apollonia is, among other things, the patron saint of dentists, apparently by virtue of having her teeth knocked out shortly before being martyred.

Glancing two boxes to the right, I was surprised to see that on this calendar February 14 is not St Valentine's Day at all. Rather, it is the day of Saints Cyril and Methodius, apostles to the Slavs. As chance would have it, Cyril and Methodius are the only saints on the page that I'm the least bit familiar with. Having once specialized in medieval Balkan history (really), I actually know them rather well.

My initial reaction was to be surprised to see them on a Roman Catholic calendar, since I associate them more with the eastern Orthodox church. But I suppose if a saint is great enough everyone wants to claim him. Anyway, though there was plenty of political rivalry between the Empire in Constantinople and Charlemagne's newly anointed Frankish kingdom, the true schism of the Church was still three centuries in the future, so I suppose either wing of the Church can claim Cyril and Methodius as their own, sort of like how both Christianity and Islam claim Aristotle and Alexander for their cultural history.

It was this political struggle that got Cyril and Methodius their famous mission. It's the 9th century, and Ratislav, prince of Moravia, is ready for his kingdom to adopt Christianity. He's wary of being dominated by the neighboring Franks, so rather than enlist Latin missionaries, he sends to Constantinople asking for Byzantine missionaries who will teach his people in their native language. Cyril already had quite a bit of experience as a missionary leader, and he and his brother Methodius were fluent in a Slavonic language that was a sort of proto-Macedonian — not quite the same as the proto-Czech that Ratislav's people would have known, but close enough — so off they went.

Offering liturgy in the vernacular was controversial at the time, so they were soon summoned to Rome. The Pope found the brothers to be loyal and competent and so the Church in Rome supported the project, even if the Holy Roman Emperor in did not. Before long, the pendulum swung in Moravia; Ratislav was turned out, and a pro-Frankish successor was installed. The Slavonic liturgy was snuffed out in Moravia, but it spread to the eastern and southern parts of the Slavic world where it thrived.

Conventional wisdom says that Cyril and Methodius were inventors of the Cyrillic alphabet. This is untrue. It is arguable that they invented the Glagolitic alphabet. That's probably false, too, as the Glagolitic alphabet seems to have evolved from various sources. But it was surely the sainted brothers who adopted and promoted the Glagolitic alphabet and made it the vehicle for ensuing spread of Slavonic literacy. The Cyrillic alphabet evolved from the Glagolitic over the next few generations, as the followers of Cyril and Methodius found the alphabet neeed improvement. They named the new and improved model after their movement's founder. The honor was not intended as a claim that Cyril invented the alphabet, though it was later taken that way.

But I digress. What of St Valentine? Wikipedia tells me that he was removed from the roster when the calendar of saints was reformed in 1969, the same time that St Christopher got the boot and for a similar reason. The Church determined that in spite of all the popular legend that surrounded him, precious little was known about any actual person named Valentine, if indeed he was a real individual at all.

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