The Czech Academy of Sciences published online its Old Church Slavonic archive

Gorazd.org

On the 22nd of December 2020, the Czech Academy of Sciences (CAS) published on the internet a digitalized version of its Old Church Slavonic Language archive. Among other documents, it features a voluminous dictionary consisting of over 20 000 entries and over 840 000 word forms, informs Meta.mk agency.

The Gorazd digital portal for the Old Church Slavonic language (gorazd.org) is available in Czech, Russian and English language and the published materials are translated and available in German, Latin, and partially in Greek language.

“The international expert public was impatiently awaiting the publication of Gorazd,” said Professor Štefan Pilát from The Department of Paleoslavistic and Byzantine Studies at the Institute of Slavonic Studies of the Czech Academy of Sciences, says the official release. The portal is offering options for searching that can be used both by researchers and laymen.

Apart from the digital dictionary, the whole registry of the Old Church Slavonic archive , was published, that was previously available in paper form. Most of the digital documents were written in the Cyrillic alphabet, but there were scanned writings written in Glagolitic аlphabet.

The animated interface of the Old Church Slavonic Card Index Archive.

In the press release that was issued about the portal, the Czech Academy of Sciences stressed that Gorazd is not only a result of a five-year project for digitizing supported by the Ministry of Culture, but that it represents part of the heritage of the work of many generations of Czech Slavists at the Institute of Slavonic Studies.

Print screen of a card for the word “honey.”

Gorazd is the name of one of the four students of Saints Cyril and Methodius’ that returned to the Balkans after the death of the educators during the Moravia mission – the remaining students were named Clement, Naum, and Angelarij.

The mission represented cooperation between the Eastern Roman Empire (later named Byzantium by the historians) and one of the first Slavic states – the Great Moravia which included parts of today’s Czech Republic and Slovakia. The mission’s goal was to spread Christianity through the language that today is known as Old Church Slavonic and represents a basis for all today’s contemporary Slavic languages.