900 YEARS OF THE BASKA STONE TABLET (SOUVENIR SHEET)

The Croatian Post issued First Day Cover (FDC). The Baška Stone Tablet (Baščanska ploča) is one of the oldest and most important Croatian epigraphic monuments whose text, cut in stone in the Glagolitic script, is of enormous importance for the Croatian history, language and literature. The Baška Stone Tablet is the left side of the erstwhile altar partition in the Benedictine church in Jurandvor near Baška on the island of Krk. It was put up following the death of King Zvonimir, probably somewhere around the year 1100. Its width is 197 cm, its height 99 cm, and it is 8 cm thick. It is a limestone tablet decorated with the Romanesque ornament - a triple vine that envelops a spread-out leaf. Below the ornament we find the barely legible text in the Glagolitic script. The letters have actually become almost completely worn off, since the tablet was used as a cover to the tomb on the church floor. When the text was noticed, the tablet was taken to Zagreb where the layer of salt was first removed and then it was preserved. Since then this precious historical monument of the Croatian written culture is on constant display in the atrium of the Croatian Academy of Science and Art. The carved text is in the transitional type of the Glagolitic script - from the round (the older) going towards the angular (the newer, Croatian) Glagolitic alphabet, with a few letters in the old Cyrillic alphabet (or the Latin alphabet which for these letters was the same). There are one hundred words cut in stone in thirteen lines, thirty letters a line, altogether four hundred letters. The study and research into the text of the Baška Stone Tablet has kept the Croatian philologists busy for a century and a half, taxing them to delve into the areas of the Glagolitic paleography, history of the language, common law, history and literature. Trying to solve the problem of the text and its message, all the eminent Croatian philologists and historians have written many works, and poets have written poetry inspired by it. There is a feeling that the Baška Stone Tablet has made the Croats "rise to the surface from the darkness of their undocumented history". The tablet marks the beginning of the written history of the Croatian language and literature. The Baška Stone Tablet gives proof of the existence of the Croatian king Zvonimir, the Benedictine Glagolitic monks, the witnesses to the king’s gift; it also proves the erection of the church. In its text there we find evident influence from both the West (Curia Romana) and the North (the centres of culture undergoing their renaissance) upon the Croatian poetic and rhetoric speech. The script, the Glagolitic alphabet, and the firm and systematic organisation of the sentence, all this makes the vivid and permanent influence of the principles of St. Cyril and Methodius clearly evident. On account of all this, the Baška Stone Tablet is a precious stone upon which rests not only the Croatian political and ecclesiastic history but the history of the Croatian language and literature as well.