Glagolitic's later history is a long retreat with one remarkable stronghold. In Bulgaria the disciples of Cyril and Methodius, expelled from Moravia after 885, trained a new generation of scribes, but there the Greek-based Cyrillic alphabet soon displaced the harder Glagolitic for most uses, and across the Orthodox Slavic world Glagolitic dwindled to a learned memory, surviving in early monuments such as the Kiev Folia and the codices of Ohrid. The exception was Croatia.
Along the Adriatic coast and on the islands, above all Krk, an angular Croatian form of the script became the vehicle of a Roman-rite liturgy in Church Slavonic, a privilege confirmed by Rome in the thirteenth century, making the Croatian Glagolites the only western Catholics with a canonical non-Latin liturgy for centuries.
The Baska tablet of about 1100, a royal donation record in Glagolitic, is treasured as a founding monument of Croatian literacy. Glagolitic missals were printed as incunabula, and the script remained in living liturgical use in pockets of Dalmatia into the twentieth century. Today it is a national symbol in Croatia, taught, carved on monuments, and kept ceremonially alive, the last visible descendant of Cyril's missionary alphabet.