“Alphabet Wars” in the Balkans

The Balkans, where the Greek and Latin written traditions co-existed in the framework of the Roman empire, became a “battle field” of scripts after the disintegration of the empire and the great changes that occurred in the Early Middle Ages. In this development the successful introduction of a “Slavonic script” (Glagolitic and shortly thereafter Cyrillic) played an important role. The changes in the use and the territorial distribution of these and other scripts (Latin, marginally also Arabic and Greek) for Slavonic languages are prese