The Alphabet of Discord

2.2 Post-imperial national identity dynamics

The collapse of the old multiethnic empires and the emergence of nation-states based on ethno-linguistic criteria, according to the principles of the model proposed by Woodrow Wilson, certainly did not exhaust the identity and ethnicity issues in the new successor countries (Keyder 1997: 41). Among the most important questions that arose after the First World War and the collapse of three multinational and centuries-old empires was certainly that of the status of ethno-linguistic and religious minorities in the new countries. After the First World War, a new legal entity, that of “national minority,” emerged for the first time at the level of international law. It was not by chance that this delicate question became the subject of numerous publications during the period, dealing with it from a juridical and political point of view. One of the most significant is The Protection of Racial, Linguistic and Racial Minorities (La protection de minorités de race, langue et religion) by the French diplomat Jacques Fouques-Duparc, which appeared in Paris in 1922.3 The concept of the new legal subject was difficult to integrate into the ideas of the nation-state that emerged during the independence struggles in the Balkans, and met opposition by the majority population in some countries, who believed that minorities living on their territory were subject only to national laws and should not enjoy concessions at the international level (Andreev Georgov 1926: 132).

In the new legal framework that recognized and established measures for the protection of minorities, special importance was attributed to the role of so-called “cultural rights,” aimed at preserving the cultural features (including language and traditions) of a given minority community, acknowledging the natural instinct of people to pass on to their children the tradition in which they themselves were brought up (cf. Fouques-Duparc 1922: 31-34). In connection with these rights, states had the obligation to fulfill three criteria: guaranteeing minorities the possibility of establishing and maintaining private associations and educational institutions; respecting the use of the minority language in the public schools; and, finally, providing the means of support for the education, ecclesiastical institutions, and charity work of the communities concerned.

A key role in managing the delicate process of transition in the post-war period was played by the League of Nations, the predecessor of today’s United Nations, which was committed to taking effective measures to ensure real protection for minorities in various European countries. This condition was considered necessary and fundamental for the preservation of peace on the old continent (Shishmanov 1926: 3). The League of Nations judged that it would prove extremely problematic to control possible irredentism, which could prove dangerous to the stability of Europe itself, if national minorities were not granted the rights they sought.

In the post-war Balkan states, a problematic process of coming to terms with the Ottoman and Habsburg heritage was underway, requiring a necessary reckoning with the legacy of a multiethnic and multilingual society. However, this process mostly took the form of a denialist attitude, which in a sense embodied the negative counterpart to the positive relationship with modernity identified with the countries of Western Europe. The Balkan countries thus inherited the task of ridding themselves of what they perceived as a kind of “historical plague,” an undertaking that proved extremely difficult (Bjelić 2011: 12). There was an obvious contradiction in this, as Europe itself imposed respect for minorities through its principles, justifying and legitimizing the presence of marginal and heterogeneous identities.

The new forces triggered by the emergence of national movements and nationalism had played a decisive role in the struggle for autonomy within the imperial multiethnic structure. These very often also determined important consequences at the level of religious organization, i.e. in the process of nationalization of the churches of the various states (see Palmieri 1913). Indeed, in the cases in question, the script controversies of the post-imperial period reveal the extent of the disintegration of the old Ottoman Christian Orthodox millet, the Rum millet. As a religious entity in control of ritual and practice, the millet had been in operation during Ottoman rule; later, the development of the Serbian and Greek national movements at the beginning of the nineteenth century encouraged a series of struggles to establish independent ecclesiastical organizations. These gave rise a few decades later to the autocephaly of the Greek Orthodox Church (1850), of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church (1870) and of the Serbian Orthodox Church (1879), which were gradually instrumentalized by their respective communities for political and national purposes (cf. Roudometof 2002: 84-85). Consequently, the idea of a commonality between members of Orthodox Christianity was gradually undermined by the emergence of particularist national interests of the new states.4

In this context, it is important to recall the close bond between writing systems and religion that was active in this part of Europe for centuries: more than the language itself, it was the alphabet that was associated with ecclesiastical culture, a fact that in turn led to its being perceived as particularly prestigious and authoritative. Thus, in the Bulgarian context, the Cyrillic alphabet represented a stable and visible element of its culture under foreign rule, expressed according to “ethno-religious” identity criteria. Nevertheless, in the Balkans, after the end of the Ottoman Empire, religion ceased to enjoy sole dominion over local cultures, being replaced by nationalist ideologies and new forms of collective identity construction inspired by the modern principles of the Western nation-state (see Garzaniti 2009). In most cases, the “nationalizing” forces drew their strength precisely from a revaluation and glorification of the (main) national language, which was elevated to the official standard and symbol of national unity (Todorova 2009: 178-179).

Since the second half of the 19th century, numerous script and orthographic reforms had taken place, which often gained strong political significance: the linguistic element hence exercised, for the first time in modern times, a “secular” force and function within a national political program. However, as a consequence of a historical narrative shaped by “mythographic” intentions, both language and its writing system, having assumed this character, were in a sense transformed into “sacralized” elements, i.e. the cornerstone of the new national identity belief. Religious faith thus became political faith (Stantchev 2015: 130-131) and script choices consequently entailed new identity choices, in a process of nation-building that significantly weakened the original religious component of the writing systems in question.

2.3 The situation in Aegean Macedonia after World War I

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.

2.4 The publication of the Abecedar (1925)

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).

2.5 Some peculiarities related to the characters of the Abecedar

The Abecedar was a text of forty pages: the first part corresponded to the primer proper, in which the letters were illustrated by pictures and examples; in the latter half some parts of speech and eight short reading texts were presented. Since, as mentioned above, the Greek government defended the position that the Slavophones in Greece were neither Bulgarians nor Serbs, but rather a specific nationality, the committee working on the primer opted for a variant of Croatian latinica, thus rejecting both the Bulgarian Cyrillic alphabet and the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet reformed by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić. The Latin alphabet used for the manual consisted of 29 letters, two of which were digraphs. Two of the characters devised by the commission were unique and corresponded to phonemes not represented in the modern Macedonian alphabet of 1945: the <î>, for the Bulgarian mid back unrounded vowel <ъ>, and <ü>, which indicated the palatalization of the previous consonant.

Miletich pointed out that the letter <ü> was introduced to indicate the sound corresponding to the Bulgarian Cyrillic letter <ю> (Miletich 1925: 230), as for example in the word lülka (люлка in Bulgarian—swing). The scholar rightly remarked that the commission in this case had preferred to adopt the German alphabet letter <ü>, instead of the digraph “ju” coming from Croatian latinica (expressed by the Bulgarian Cyrillic grapheme “ю”) (Sagiaksis, Lazarou, & Papazahariou 1925: 37).

The authors of the Abecedar introduced a further innovation: instead of using the single grapheme , which is characteristic of Croatian latinica (as a semivowel or syllabic consonant, as occurs, for example, in the word “drvo”—“tree”), they decided to transliterate into Latin characters the Cyrillic combination <ър> of the two sounds involved. Thus, they represented the correspondent of the Bulgarian Cyrillic letter <ъ> separately, through the use of a letter coming from the Romanian alphabet, <î> (similar to the muted <ı> which would have been adopted shortly afterwards in the new Turkish alphabet). Consequently, in the Abecedar, the word for “tree” is “dîrvo.” The same <î> designates the Bulgarian character <ъ> in the word sînceto (= слънцето in Bulgarian, p. 37). In the texts in the Abecedar we can also observe that the authors indicated the specific Macedonian consonant rendered in its contemporary Macedonian Cyrillic version through the character with the digraph , as well as today’s Macedonian Cyrillic letters <ќ> and <ѓ> with the digraphs and .