Right-to-left Cyrillic among the Bogomils?
Synopse
In his famous book on scripts and religion, Mieses (1919: 325) reports that “The Manichaean-Bogomil Bulgarians left behind some inscriptions in a Cyrillic script written from right to left rather than from left to right”. In my quest to find these inscriptions through a web of imprecise quotations without references, I found out that what he meant were actually members of the Bosnian Church. Indeed, in Bosnia one can find exactly two inscriptions that look inverted, on a stećak for Vlatko Vlađević and a tomb slab for Pavao Komlinović. After considering other possible explanations for the reversed inscriptions (secret writing, magic, direction of objects), the unspectacular solution seems to be that the stonemasons engraving the letters were illiterate and made technical mistakes. A brief inspection of other cases of “schismatic” changes in writing direction cited by Mieses reveals that none of them is actually caused by a change in religion, and his hypothesis can be rejected completely.
Originally written in English for my habilitation thesis as submitted to the faculty but then published separately in German as “Linksläufige kyrillische Schrift bei den Bogumilen?” in Meyer, Anna-Maria & Reinkowski, Ljiljana (eds.), Im Rhythmus der Linguistik: Festschrift für Sebastian Kempgen zum 65. Geburtstag, 115–134. Bamberg: University of Bamberg Press 2017. DOI: 10.20378/irbo-49095.
