Calendar of Birchbark Manuscripts

The first birchbark letter was discovered in 1951, and since then these monuments of Old Russian script have continued to expand our understanding of life centuries ago. The letters of Onfim, who lived in Novgorod in the 13th century, are particularly famous. The calendar is based on a boy’s letter, where letters and syllables are adjacent to drawings of warriors on horseback.

In the 13th century, in Rus', numbers were denoted by letters from the Slavic alphabet; therefore, the familiar system we use for dating in a calendar is aligned with the ancient one.