In their old motherland the Slavs did not have their alphabet and, as Crnorizec Hrabar says in his work "O pismeneh" (About the Letters), for a long time "with dashes and notches they were reading and telling fortunes". They had a sort of a tally board. When they came to the Balkans and were christened, they wrote their Slavonic words with Roman and Greek letters, without any rules. However, those letters did not allow for the accurate spelling of many Slavonic words. The Greek alphabet had no letters for numerous Slavonic phonemes. "Then Saint Constantine the Philosopher named Cyril, a righteous and veracious man, created them 38 letters, one according to the Greek letters, and the other by Slavonic language."
Medieval history holds yet another enigma: did Crnorizec Hrabar ever exist, or was he a pseudonym for Cyril, Clement of Ohrid or even Naum? In any case, the first Slavonic polemical text, O Pismeneh (On Letters), is a panegyric and homage to Slav literacy and to the work of Sts. Cyril and Methodius. He defended the Slav alphabet and protected the Slav cultural opus.