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Cyril and Methodius, brothers who are credited with devising the Glagolitic alphabet to transcribe scripture.

Biljana Vankovska, a law professor at the Saint Cyril and Methodius University’s Institute for Security, Defense and Peace, slammed the French proposal as bowing to “the nationalistic and chauvinistic demands of Bulgaria.”

In Prague, which boasted a pre-war Ukrainian community of nearly 200,000, Nataliya Krasnopolskaia said she began attending services regularly at the Cathedral Church of Sts Cyril and Methodius since arriving from Odesa on March 6.

In a recent interview with Bulgarian state television, Anna-Maria Totomanova, an academic at the Department of Cyril and Methodius Studies at Sofia University, denounced the Czech archaeologists as charlatans.

Anger has spread beyond the Czech Republic to foreign scholars who reject the possibility that Slavs wrote anything down before two Greek monks, Cyril and Methodius, arrived in Moravia in the ninth century and created a system of writing that later developed into the script known as Cyrillic.