Glagolitic

Glagolitic is the alphabet history half-forgot. When Saints Cyril and Methodius went to Great Moravia in 863 to preach in the Slavs' own language, Cyril devised a brand-new alphabet for it — and that alphabet was Glagolitic, not the Cyrillic that now bears his name. Its letters are original and ornate, full of loops and crosses, owing little in shape to Greek.

Cyrillic, simpler and Greek-based, was assembled a little later by Cyril's followers and gradually displaced Glagolitic across most of the Slavic Orthodox world. The Cyrillic plaque records the same naming irony from the other side: the script named for Cyril was not the one Cyril made.

Cyril's real alphabet — outshone by the one that borrowed his name.

But in Croatia and Dalmatia the older script clung on for centuries as a liturgical and even everyday hand — a rare case of the "replaced" alphabet outliving its own obsolescence by hundreds of years. The mission and its two scripts are treated at length in the Inventors' Room on Floor 2.

The brief of 863 was to translate scripture into Slavonic. To carry those sounds Cyril did not adapt Greek — he drew a whole new set of letters, original and ornate. That script was Glagolitic, not Cyrillic; the Greek-based alphabet that took his name came later, from his followers.