1494: the year Serbian Cyrillic got a printing press, decades before it lost one
A manuscript proves a script already existed; a printed book proves something different - that the technology reached it early. Barely forty years after Gutenberg, a mountain principality on the Adriatic ran a Cyrillic press for two short years before an empire ended it. The book it produced answers a question the rest of this blog's history articles keep circling: Serbian Cyrillic in print is centuries older than the moment it briefly went silent.
Two earlier articles on this blog made a point of separating two different questions: whether Serbian Cyrillic existed, and what language it was actually recording. Miroslav's Gospel answered the first with a single hand-copied manuscript, seven centuries before Vuk. This article answers a third question neither one touched: when did that same Cyrillic first reach a printing press - and the answer is startlingly close to the technology's own European debut.
A ruler squeezed between two empires
By the 1490s, Zeta - a small mountain principality on the Adriatic, the direct ancestor of modern Montenegro - was one of the last pieces of the old Serbian medieval world still standing between an expanding Ottoman Empire and Venice's coastal holdings. Its ruler, Đurađ Crnojević, made an unusual choice for a statelet with so little time left: he imported a printing press, almost certainly by way of Venice, and set it up in his capital, Cetinje.
Finished on 4 January 1494
The actual printing was carried out under a hieromonk named Makarije, and the first book off the press - the Oktoih prvoglasnik, a liturgical hymnal - was finished on that exact date. It is not the very first book ever printed in the Cyrillic alphabet; a press in Kraków had printed Cyrillic liturgical books a few years earlier for the Orthodox communities of Poland and Ukraine. It is, more narrowly and more relevantly here, the first book printed in Cyrillic anywhere in South-Eastern Europe, and the first printed in what the previous article on this blog named directly: srpskoslovenski, the Serbian recension of Church Slavonic.
Oktoih je odštampan u Cetinju 1494. godine.
The Oktoih was printed in Cetinje in 1494.
A plain statement of the fact, not a line from the book itself - the actual colophon is a specialist's text, not one worth quoting from memory.
Two years, five books, one conquest
The Crnojević press did not run for long. Between 1493 and 1496 it produced five liturgical books in total, praised even by outsiders at the time for print quality on par with contemporary Venetian work. Then, in 1496, the same year Đurađ Crnojević's own rule ended, Ottoman forces absorbed Zeta and the press fell silent. Serbian Cyrillic print did not vanish for good - a merchant named Božidar Vuković set up another Serbian press in Venice a little over two decades later - but it never again operated on Serbian-ruled soil for the next several centuries.
This is the missing piece behind a detail the srpskoslovenski article left unexplained: why Serbs resettling in Habsburg territory after 1690 had "almost no printing press of their own" and imported books from Russia instead. It is not that Serbian Cyrillic printing had never existed - it had, two centuries earlier, right up until an empire ended it. What 1690 lacked was not the tradition; it was the equipment.
What this settles, and what it does not
Do not read the Oktoih as evidence about the vernacular. The language on its pages is srpskoslovenski, the same liturgical register Miroslav's scribes were already using three centuries earlier, not the everyday Serbian anyone in Cetinje actually spoke - that gap is precisely what Vuk's reform closed three hundred years later. What the Oktoih settles is narrower and, in its own way, more surprising: within roughly forty years of Gutenberg's press, the same Cyrillic alphabet this blog keeps returning to already had one running on the Adriatic coast.