Читать книгу The Alphabet of Discord - Giustina Selvelli - Страница 13

In Bulgaria, the so-called “Macedonian question” was a source of bitterness since the Berlin Congress (1878) (cf. Miletich 1926), where a decisive blow was delivered to the country’s national vision and imagination. Only a few months earlier, Bulgaria had seen its political unity with Macedonia acknowledged by the Treaty of St. Stephen, in line with the already existing cultural union under the aegis of the Bulgarian Church. After the ratification of this treaty, the conviction remained alive that the Bulgarian Church, together with the Bulgarian language, would remain the only safeguard for the nation, whose unity was threatened by the fragmentation imposed by external powers. The situation continued to develop to the disadvantage of the country with the Second Balkan War (1913) and then the First World War, when almost half of the greater region of Macedonia came under Greek control, to be followed by Western Thrace with the Treaty of Neuilly 1919 (Rossos 2008: 131).

Thereafter, a process of rapid Hellenization began in the region under Greek control, called Aegean Macedonia, determined by two conventions for the exchange of alloglottic populations: the Greek-Bulgarian in 1919 and, especially, the Greek-Turkish in 1923 (Rallo 2004: 17). Through the Treaty of Neuilly, signed at the end of the First World War, Greece and Bulgaria agreed to a voluntary population exchange: about 46,000 Greeks left Bulgaria, while 92,000 Bulgarians left the Hellenic state (Pentzopoulos 2002: 60). Subsequently, under pressure from the League of Nations and in accordance with the new Treaty of Sèvres (the peace treaty signed in 1920 between the Allied powers of the First World War and the Ottoman Empire), Greece was obliged to protect the ethno-linguistic minorities on its territory by providing an adequate education system in their mother tongue (Andonovski 1985: 2).

The Treaty of Sèvres guaranteed ethnic minorities in Greece the free use of their mother tongue in all spheres, and therefore the Greek state had to ensure the establishment of a budget for the development and operation of special schools for minorities. Article 7 of the same treaty also stipulated that all citizens on Greek territory, regardless of their ethnicity, language or religion, enjoyed the same civil and political rights as well as the free use of their language in private communication, in commerce, in religion, in the press and at public meetings (Article 7, Treaty of Sèvres). Article 9 clarified that in villages and districts populated by a majority of non-Greek-speaking citizens, the Greek government was obliged to provide adequate facilities to allow primary education in the minority’s mother tongue (Article 9, Treaty of Sèvres).

Despite these stipulations, the educational question remained unresolved for a long time, since Greece was then struggling with serious demographic problems, during the war with Turkey, which caused the Asia Minor Catastrophe and the population exchange of 1923, bringing some 1.3 million people into Greek territory (see Pentzopoulos 2002). The Lausanne Convention of July 1923 ended the bloody Greek-Turkish conflict and established the borders between Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey (Kuševski 1983: 179). The arrival of a huge Greek population from neighboring Turkey led to the deterioration of conditions for the other minorities on Greek territory, including the Bulgarian minority in the region of Thrace and the so-called “Slavophone”5 minority in Aegean Macedonia. This provoked a reaction from Bulgaria, which had already turned to the League of Nations in March 1923 with a request to intervene to protect the Bulgarian population in West Thrace, denouncing, among other things, the closure of Bulgarian schools and churches by the Greek authorities (Kuševski 1983: 181).

As a result of the negotiations conducted with the League of Nations and in the spirit of the Sèvres Agreement, the Politis-Kalfov Protocol for the protection of the Greek minority in Bulgaria and the Bulgarian minority in Greece was signed in Geneva on 29 September 1924 by the Greek and Bulgarian Foreign Ministers, in the presence of a representative of the League of Nations. Contrary to expectations, however, the Greek Parliament later refused to ratify the Protocol, and tried to disrupt visits by League of Nations officials to the areas of interest in Aegean Macedonia (Michailidis 2005: 95). Indeed, the Greek government feared that the Slavophone population, which, despite the assumptions of the Protocol, was not considered as belonging to the Bulgarian ethnic group, might “pretend” to be such in order to profit from this position and embolden Sofia to strengthen its claims and influence in the region. This about-face by the Greek government was the subject of another meeting of the League of Nations, which called on Greece to implement the agreements reached earlier (Kuševski 1983: 184).

In its letter of reply, the Greek government contested the right of the Bulgarian government to interfere in its internal affairs, claiming that the participation of Bulgarian representatives in the Mixed Greco-Bulgarian Emigration Commission did not confer on the Bulgarian government any rights over the Slavic population living in Greek Macedonia (ibid., 185).6 The Greeks explained in a memorandum that they were confronted with the presence of various Slavic-speaking minorities rather than a single Bulgarian minority. It should be noted, however, that public opinion in the country was strongly against the recognition of any “Slavic” minority in Aegean Macedonia.

The League of Nations called upon the Greek government to meet the linguistic and educational needs of its minorities: as a consequence, Greece undertook to prepare textbooks and to appoint teachers for the education of the population concerned in its territories (cit. in Miletich 1925: 230). The next step, therefore, was to prepare a manual to serve as a reference for instruction. The Abecedar was printed in Athens in the summer of 1925, based on a hybrid dialect, a sort of mixture of the Florina and Prilep-Bitola varieties. The most important fact, however, is that it was written in Latin rather than Cyrillic letters: the alphabet used was based on Croatian latinica, to which some graphemes were added. This fact can be interpreted as a manifestation of Greek willingness to block further claims by Bulgaria and Serbia on the population in question, and thus to alienate their cultural influence through the highly symbolic use of an alternative writing system.