Typeface Design for Old Church Slavonic Scholarship

A typeface that runs Peter the Great's script reform in reverse

Zhivov inverts the logic of Peter the Great's 18th-century Cyrillic reform: where that reform pushed Cyrillic letterforms toward Latin shapes, Zhivov applies Old Church Slavonic construction principles to the Latin script. Designed by CSTM Fonts, it strips glyphs of contrast, decoration, and period-specific stylistic markers, making it equally appropriate for books on the Ostromir Gospels and content addressing birchbark manuscripts. It provides comprehensive Unicode Old Church Slavonic coverage, including alternative glyph forms, superscript symbols, ligatures, OCS numerals, and manuscript characters absent from the standard Cyrillic Unicode block. The typeface is offered free of charge to scholars working with Old Church Slavonic language and literature.

Set in Zhivov