Saint Saint Naum

Naum (Bulgarian and Macedonian: Свети Наум, romanized: Sveti Naum), also known as Naum of Ohrid or Naum of Preslav (c. 830 – December 23, 910), was a medieval Bulgarian writer and missionary among the Slavs, considered one of the Seven Apostles of the First Bulgarian Empire. He was among the disciples of Cyril and Methodius and is associated with the creation of the Glagolitic and Cyrillic script. Naum was among the founders of the Pliska Literary School. Afterwards Naum worked at the Ohrid Literary School. He was among the first saints declared by the Bulgarian Orthodox Church after its foundation in the 9th century. The mission of Naum played significant role by transformation of the local Early Slavs into Bulgarians. Information about his early life is scarce. According to the Second Life of Saint Naum, he grew up in Moesia, which was the Byzantine designation for Bulgaria. According to the hagiography of Clement of Ohrid by Theophylact of Ohrid and some other sources, Naum took part in the historic mission to Great Moravia together with Cyril and Methodius, their disciples Gorazd, Clement of Ohrid, Angelar and Sava and other Slavic missionaries in 863. For the next 22 years, he worked with Cyril and Methodius and other missionaries in translating the Bible into Old Church Slavonic and promoted it in Great Moravia and Principality of Lower Pannonia. In 867 or 868 he became a priest in Rome, ordained along with two other disciples of Cyril and Methodius, Gorazd and Clement of Ohrid, by bishops Formosus and Gauderic. For the purpose of the mission to Moravia, the missionaries devised the Glagolitic alphabet, the first alphabet to match the specific features of the Slavic language. Its descendant script, Cyrillic, is still used by many languages today. The missionaries also wrote the first Slavic Civil Code, which was used in Great Moravia. However, the missionary work ran into opposition from German clerics who opposed their efforts to create a Slavic liturgy.