Читать книгу The Alphabet of Discord - Giustina Selvelli - Страница 17

The function of writing systems as a tool to represent the “distinctiveness” of an ethnic group has been familiar to national movements in the Balkans, and Eastern Europe in general, since the 19th century. In many cases, when an alphabet had already been in use for centuries but no extensive literature existed in the vernacular, it was retained and given a slightly different coloration to distinguish it from the writing system of the dominant power or of a competing ethnic group (Wellish 1978: 43). In the case of the Slavic population of Aegean Macedonia, it was the Greeks themselves who cleverly exploited this element, becoming the protagonists of a “graphopoietic” work, without realizing that they had thus set an important precedent precisely for the “Macedonian cause” that worked against their own interest.

Since one of the main characteristics of the graphic aspect of language, exceeding even the oral aspect, is the fact of its being socially controllable, writing proves to be a strong instrument of power (Cardona 1982: 6). In the Bulgarian case, the alphabet revealed itself to be an essential tool of the “symbolic cultivation” (Smith 2009) of national identity and unity, appearing as an element of continuity in the history of its people: hence, literacy practices themselves became means capable of engaging the public in official debates and rhetoric. After all, literacy itself is based on a system of symbols, since writing is a set of symbolic elements used for communicative purposes that inevitably acquires a strong social meaning (Barton 1994: 43).

At the beginning of his review of the Abecedar, Miletich noted that, despite its serious shortcomings, the text at least represented recognition of the wishes of a minority population that boldly demanded its children’s right to be taught in their mother tongue. But how closely did this statement correspond to reality? What was the fate of this school manual and what were the reactions of the affected population? Certainly, this school manual did not fulfill its intended role, which was to serve the education of local Slavophones. Rather, it represented an attempt at “imposed literacy” (cf. Barton 1994: 78) by the Greek authorities, as well as a restriction of the Slavophones’ possible literacy practices, which were oriented towards different social and religious goals.

A few copies of the controversial Abecedar reached the Slavic-speaking villages of Aegean Macedonia in early 1926, several months late due to the Incident at Petrich, the aforementioned invasion of Bulgaria by Greece. However, these copies of the primer encountered an unfortunate fate: in one village, the incomprehensibility of the text to one of the few literate inhabitants (who could read Cyrillic) led the population to throw all copies into a nearby lake (Tramontano 1999: 327). The distribution of the Abecedar in the village of Amyntaion, near Florina, proved disastrous: the residents reacted violently and burned all the books, which they considered an insult to their “Greekness” (Michailidis 1996: 341)! The inhabitants of this village, both Slavophones and Hellenophones, protested together for days, finally deciding to send a telegram to the Foreign Minister to express their exasperation at the introduction of an undesirable language into the their children’s schools. As if that were not enough, they also sent a message of protest to the League of Nations, which was published in the Greek daily Newspaper of the Balkans (Efimeris ton Valkanion) on 2 February 1926 (Michailidis, ibid.):

We pray that our Government will transmit to the League of Nations our and our children’s strong protest against the grave insult to our national pride and consciousness.

We confirm our decision to support until death our fathers’ institutions and the pure Greek tradition of Alexander the Great.

We declare a bloody war against any violent and illiberal plot against our Greek mother tongue.

We reject the instruction of the Macedono-Slavic dialect in schools, reviving memories of violence, fear, terror, gallows—i.e., the traditional means of Bulgarian practice. […] (in: Michailidis, ibid.)

Undoubtedly, such externalization of Greek identity and rejection of the Bulgarian—or “Slavic”—one can be comprehended on the basis of at least two considerations. Firstly, and rather predictably, by the fact that a population generally prefers to learn and use a writing system that is as close as possible to the prestige language that surrounds it, in order to better integrate into the social context of reference (Berry 1977: 5). Secondly, it should not be forgotten that illiteracy rates were very high at the time, a context that favored the control and manipulation of literacy practices for assimilationist purposes by Greek institutions in various ways.

To conclude, it is clear that the Greek government decided to use Latin characters expecting that the Abecedar would be rejected by all actors for this very reason. After various protests from the addressees, almost all copies of this primer were destroyed, and those that remained were withdrawn from circulation. There was no more discussion of education in the mother tongue and in 1927 the Greek government issued a directive aimed at removing all Cyrillic inscriptions from churches, tombstones, icons, and all other monuments in the area: a veritable campaign against this alphabet, revealing an assimilationist and mono-ethnic policy (Rossos 2008: 147). Such destruction of the cultural heritage of minority writing would be repeated on many occasions in the following history of the Balkan region, and not only in Greece.10 In addition to this, in August 1926, the Greek government and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes signed a protocol recognizing the Serbian nationality of the Slavic-speaking minority in Greece (Tramontano 1999: 328), a move clearly aimed at keeping Bulgaria out of the matter in every respect.

We can observe two other a posteriori elements in relation to the Abecedar, which, in a sense, seem to contradict each other. The first is that, at the time of its publication, this primer, which “teemed with errors” (Kočev 1996: 54), certainly did not help create a writing tradition or keep an existing one alive. In fact, as a result of this affair, and especially after a new law passed in 1936 (cf. Tramontano 1999: 328), the local Slavic language spoken by the population in Aegean Macedonia was also banned in its oral form in public places, surviving only in the domestic environment (Kočev, 1996: 54). In light of this, we can see a further reinforcement of the Greek campaigns of cultural assimilation, confirming that, in the process of creating an independent state after a previous imperial condition, nationalism inevitably coincides with the emergence of forms of “cultural centralism” (Zakhos-Papazahariou 1972: 150).

The second consideration to be made is that, although in practice the primer never reached the school desks of the children of the Slavic-speaking community, it is still considered by Macedonians today11 as one of the most significant testimonies to the existence of a significant national Macedonian community in Greece, and to its language and thus identity (Andonovski 1985: 8).12

1 See on this topic the works Orientalism, by Edward Said (1978) and Imagining the Balkans, by Maria Todorova (1997).

2 The term “Significant Others” is used in social psychology to refer to those persons who are of sufficient importance in an individual‘s life to influence his or her emotions, behavior, and sense of self. The first definition of Significant Others dates back to the American psychiatrist Harry Sullivan in 1940. This term can be used at the “macro level” in the study of ethnopsychology or “national psychology”.

3 Other publications of the period dealing with these issues are La protection des droits des minorités dans les traités internationaux de 1919-1920 by M. V. Vishniak (1920), Le problème des minorités devant le droit international, by Jean Lucien-Brun (1923), Les minorités, l‘État et la communauté internationale by Dragolioub Krstitch (1924).

4 See Roudometof: “the Bulgarian crusade for a national church entailed a direct challenge to the whole Ottoman concept of administration, which identified nationality with religious confession. This was because the Bulgarians did not possess a state of their own (at least until 1878), and therefore there was no territorial political unit that could be directly linked to a Bulgarian church” (2002: 85).

5 I employ this term in a neutral way to identify the Slavic-speaking communities present in Greek territories in that period.

6 Cit. in Kuševski 1983: 187.

7 Cited in the preface to the third edition of the Abecedar in 2006.

8 Cited document: United Nations Library and Archive Geneva, R. 1975, Doc. No. 41/47674/39349

9 Guentcheva notes: “Though the commission of linguists and writers recommended simplification of the graphic system, the majority of the intelligentsia in Bulgaria insisted on retaining the visual distance between Bulgarian and Serbian through orthography” (ibid.).

10 Examples of this are the destruction of the written heritage in Arabic characters in Bulgaria, both in the first years of independence and during the assimilationist campaigns in the last years of communism (consisting of gravestones in Arabic or Turkish characters, school registers, documents in Turkish), the destruction of the written heritage in arebica in Bosnia during the war by the Bosnian Serbs and the campaigns against the Cyrillic script in Vukovar, as we will see in chapter 8.

11 Those in Greece, in the Republic of North Macedonia and in the world diaspora.

12 The Abecedar has been reissued two times since 1925, first in 1993 by the Macedonian Information Center in Australia and then in 2006, in Thessaloniki, at the initiative of the Macedonian ethnic (Slavic) political party, Rainbow. In line with the principles of its political platform, the Rainbow Party states that the Abecedar constitutes one of a series of official Greek documents that distinguished Macedonian identity from Greek identity well before 1945.