Mikulčice-Valy, Great Moravia

A prince asked Constantinople for teachers

In 862 Prince Rastislav of Great Moravia asked the Byzantine emperor Michael III to send missionaries to his Slavic subjects. In 863 two brothers arrived: Constantine, later known as Cyril, and Methodius.

They brought something new. They were translating the Gospels and the liturgy into Slavonic and had devised an alphabet for it, the Glagolitic script, the first used for Slavonic manuscripts.

It was also politics. Rastislav, who ruled from 846, stood in a long contest between Frankish and Byzantine influence over who would Christianise Moravia.

Churches among the river channels

Mikulčice, in the wooded floodplain of the Morava in southern Moravia, is a leading candidate for Rastislav's seat. Its acropolis of about six hectares stood on raised ground ringed by slow river channels, behind a timber-framed rampart faced with stone, and a long wooden bridge crossed to the outer bailey.

By 863 it already had stone churches. Archaeologists have found at least eleven, among them church 3, a three-aisled basilica about 35 metres long and 11 wide, with an eastern apse, a western atrium and a narthex, built of stone brought from the White Carpathians. It is the largest church known from Great Moravia, and near it stood a stone princely hall of about 26 by 10 metres.

The graves describe the court. More than 2,600 burials have been excavated since Josef Poulík began large-scale digging in 1955: nobles with swords, spurs and gilded spherical buttons called gombíky, women with gold earrings shaped like bunches of grapes.

Nobody wrote down where the brothers arrived

The sources say the mission came to Rastislav; they do not say where. Mikulčice and Staré Město near Uherské Hradiště both claim to be his seat, and placing the brothers here is a reasonable guess, not a recorded fact. Their route and the season of their arrival are unknown too.

What followed is better documented. Pope Adrian II authorised the Slavonic liturgy, and Constantine became a monk in Rome, took the name Cyril, and died there on 14 February 869. Methodius, made archbishop with jurisdiction over Moravia and Pannonia, died on 6 April 885, and his disciples, expelled from Great Moravia, carried Slavonic letters to Bulgaria.

Mikulčice did not outlast the state. Settled perhaps from the eighth century, it faded with the collapse of Great Moravia early in the tenth.

Why Czechs keep 5 July

The Czech state holiday on 5 July honours Cyril and Methodius as the bringers of Slavonic letters. For Czechs the mission is the founding story of writing in a Slavic language, and it puts Moravia at the very start of their history.

The inheritance is shared. Great Moravia and the mission are Slovak national heritage too, and the modern border runs through the old landscape: about two kilometres east, across the Morava in Slovakia, the church of St Margaret of Antioch at Kopčany dates to the ninth century.

Mikulčice is on UNESCO's tentative list for World Heritage status. Only foundations survive, and the reconstructed shingle roofs are an informed guess.

Sources

• Wikipedia (en): Mikulčice-Valy
• Wikipedia (cs): Slovanské hradiště Mikulčice
• pamatkovykatalog.cz
• mzm.cz