Читать книгу The Alphabet of Discord - Giustina Selvelli - Страница 14

The publication of the Abecedar by the Department for the Education of Foreign-Speakers in the Greek Ministry of Education in the autumn of 1925 was widely reported in the Greek press. Nikolas Zafiris, a publicist and specialist on Balkan issues, judged it an “extraordinary event” (cit. in Andonovski 1985: 4) in the life of minorities in Greece. In the daily Free Tribune (Elefthero Vima) of 19 October 1925, Zafiris wrote:

We have prepared the Abecedar for the Slavophones, which was compiled with care and good intention by the Greek specialists Papazahariou, Sagiaksis and Lazarou [...] The primer is intended for use in the schools that will soon be opened in Greek Macedonia and Western Thrace for the Slavic-speaking population. This primer will be used to teach the Slavophones in Greece. The Abecedar is printed in the Latin alphabet [...]. (cit. in Andonovski 1985: 4; my translation)

As expected, news of the publication of the Abecedar caused quite a stir in Bulgaria, sparking outrage over what was perceived as an affront to the country’s national identity and a new attack aimed at undermining the cultural unity between Bulgarians and Macedonians. With regard to the above-mentioned cultural rights, it can be said that, since in the Bulgarian national vision the authoritative cultural tradition was perceived as linked to the linguistic and written heritage (cf. Dečev 2014: 11), these rights were to some extent “alphabetic rights.” In this sense we can understand the Bulgarian desire to protect Cyrillic in the communities of Greek Macedonia, as well as later (as we shall see in the next chapter) in the country itself.

There were many Bulgarian expressions of indignation. The pro-government newspaper Word (Slovo) called the appearance of this primer “a triumphalist cynicism” (Shishmanov 1926: 4). In an article published on 10 October 1925, the newspaper Democratic Alliance (Demokratičeski Sgovor) noted that the primer produced by the Greek Ministry of Education was the first act of a “farce full of comic elements,” which turned out to be not funny at all, since the whole subject was “infinitely tragic and serious” (ibid., 5). This manual was also described as a provocation to the League of Nations itself, which was called upon to monitor the rights of minorities (ibid.).

Similarly, in an article published 17 October 1925, the Macedonian youth organization, in its newspaper Impetus (Ustrem), described the Abecedar as “a shameless monument to the barbarism and political arrogance of our democratic century, a diabolical and vile invention of Greek Bulgarophobia, the fruit of strong subtle calculations, germinated in a very lucid mind and in one of the murkiest of consciences” (cit. in Shishmanov 1926: 6; my translation). In autumn 1925, the Bulgarian delegate to the League of Nations, Dimitar Mikov, was given permission to report on what he saw as the Greek government’s negligence to comply with the needs of the Bulgarian minority, which continued to be denied access to educational institutions in its mother tongue. Mikov drew attention primarily to the primer itself, “a work of dubious respectability which made a very bad impression in Bulgaria” (cit. in Tramontano 1999: 323; my translation).

The publication of this primer in Latin letters irritated not only the Bulgarian government, but also that of Nikola Pašić in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. In particular, Pašić reacted by claiming that the Slavic population in Aegean Macedonia consisted of Serbs, a fact which legitimized his defense of the minority rights in this region (Kuševski 1983: 187). The thorny situation in Greece also became an object of interest for the League of Nations, and the petitions of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes concerning the “Serb minority” in Greece, in the words of Director Erol Colban, added confusion to the complex mosaic of this Balkan region (ibid.).

In this context, it was quite clear that Greece had not acted sincerely towards its Slavic-speaking minority, especially because of the choice of the writing system in which this population was to be taught. A document from the archives of the League of Nations in Geneva7 illustrates the Greek position in a letter written to Colban on 10 November 1925 by Vasilis Dendramis, representative of the Greek government to the League of Nations (Filipov Voskopoulos 2006: 53-54).8 In it, Dendramis defended the decision to adopt the Latin alphabet for writing this language, justifying it on the basis of the positions of Slavicists such as Pavel Jozef Šafárik, Kuzman Šapkarev, Stojan Novaković, Vatroslav Jagić and others. In another document we also read that a linguist called O’Mologni, of the Secretariat of the League of Nations, spoke in support of the Cyrillic alphabet, explaining that the decision of the Greek government to adopt the Latin alphabet was connected with national reasons (ibid.). In fact, the motivations for this script choice are to be sought in political dynamics, certainly not in educational or orthographic ones: the adoption of an alternative writing system could serve as a defense against “Slavic” interference, with which the Cyrillic alphabet was associated, i.e., Bulgarian and Serbian propaganda, which, in the Greek view, to some extent threatened its sovereignty over Thessaloniki.

On 18 October 1925, a Greek army detachment crossed the Greek-Bulgarian border at the village of Petrich in Bulgaria. This event, called the Incident at Petrich, gave rise to a revival of the dispute over the Abecedar in the Bulgarian press, which unanimously condemned the appearance of this school manual, describing it as “a document of political hypocrisy and a mockery of the principles of national minorities proclaimed by international treaties and the League of Nations” (Shishmanov 1926: 1). These reactions were joined by those of two eminent scholars: Ivan Shishmanov and Lyubomir Miletich, important representatives of the Bulgarian academic world: the first a renowned philologist and folklorist, the second a distinguished linguist and ethnographer. Both received a copy of the Abecedar in the autumn of 1925, studied it carefully, and arrived at their considerations based on the complete original text. The result was a scientific review of the Abecedar published by Miletich in Macedonian Review (Makedonski Pregled), the journal of which he was editor, and a pamphlet published in French by Shishmanov in January 1926 entitled The Primer for the Use of the Bulgarian Minorities in Greece (L’abécédaire a l’usage des minorités bulgares en Grèce).