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2.7 Conclusions: the fate of the Abecedar after 1925
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.
3. THE “LATINIZATION” IDEOLOGY AND THE BULGARIAN DEBATES
3.1 Introduction: issues of script change
The 1920s can be considered the period par excellence in relation to debates on script reform in the wider Eurasian region. Specific political and ideological factors in the post-war period played a fundamental role in the forced introduction of new writing systems for different languages and in the formulation of proposals for more or less effective script reforms. In the development of these issues, one of the most important factors was the idea proposed in the official circles of the USSR for the need to introduce a common Latin-based alphabet in communist Russia.
Discussion of the possibility of replacing the Cyrillic alphabet with the Latin also arose in Bulgaria, especially in the pages of the journal Bulgarian Book (Balgarska Kniga), through the editorial poll held in 1930 under the title “Cyrillic or Latin: The Bulgarian Character” (“Kirilica ili Latinica. Balgarskijat shrift”) that saw the participation of representatives of the intellectual, graphic, typographic and political worlds of the period.
In general, it can be stated that, in the course of the universal history of writing, sudden changes in the graphic form of a language represent a rather rare phenomenon, since linguistic communities tend to stick to a writing system already in use (even in cases where it is a particularly difficult one) for a series of political, cultural and religious or ideological reasons (Cardona 2009b: 141-142). Indeed, the replacement of one writing system by another is perceived not only as a threat to cultural tradition, but also to the power structures with which local intellectual authorities are associated. In this regard, Florian Coulmas has observed that “changes involving the script rather than only the spelling conventions have more weighty consequences for the society, since they entail a much more drastic break with a tradition” (Coulmas 1989: 242). That is, the longer the previous writing system has functioned as a marker of authenticity and specificity (even at the political level), the less likely it is that this script can be entirely replaced without extreme consequences at the level of the organization of power (cf. Fishman 1988: 280, Cardona 2009a: 93-94). For this very reason it is interesting to take a look at the proposals for the adoption of alternative writing systems as well as at their reception, even in those cases where such script reforms did not actually take place.
3.2 The Latinization ideology in the Soviet Union
The case of Soviet Union epitomizes, in some ways, the most striking example of how a government can continually and repeatedly use its power to decide and interfere on script matters. In the seventy-five years of USSR’s existence, indeed, Moscow authorities intervened on several occasions in the writing/literacy practices of the country’s national communities and minorities, making decisions in this field on the basis of political needs that varied according to the different historical moments and ideological phases the country faced (Collin 2011: 52).
It was only after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia that the ideology of Latinization, that is, the conversion to the Latin script, began to take concrete shape, thanks to the collaboration of a number of intellectuals, including eminent linguists such as Nikolai F. Yakovlev and Yevgeny D. Polivanov. According to these scholars, Cyrillic was a writing system associated with the religious and ideological values of the Tsarist empire (see, e.g., Yakovlev 1930: 35): consequently, in the modified socio-political context, it had to be replaced by Latin, which appeared to be much better suited to serve the new educational and ideological purposes.
Politically, a Latin-based alphabet represented the most neutral choice, as least influenced by ideological or ethnic identifications: at the time, it was not markedly associated with the West, but rather with the possibility of achieving universal progress and a revolution in the communicative field. For all these reasons, it was decided to support the creation of Latin-based alphabets for all the languages of the nationalities present in the Empire, including those that had been neglected in the past1 (Alpatov 2002: 117), those which had no written form (see Winner 1952: 134) or those that used writing systems considered unacceptable for cultural and ideological reasons, such as the Arabic alphabet or the ancient Mongolian writing system (Henze 1977: 379).
Before the advent of the ideology of Latinization, the first move in script policy pursued by the central Soviet authorities was the reform of the Arabic writing system. Although this reform was not particularly far-reaching, its main aim was to establish greater coherence between phonemes and graphemes in a writing system regarded as “archaic” (Crisp 1990: 25), and its effects became visible, as in the case of the Tatar communities that adopted the reformed Arabic script with particular vigor (Henze 1977: 414). Among the various examples in this regard, we should also mention the introduction of a reformed and improved Arabic alphabet for the Uzbeks, Kazakhs and Kyrgyzs in 1923.
Nevertheless, after a short time, the central authorities realized that this policy of reforming the Arabic alphabet was by no means the most effective solution for attaining greater unification of the peoples within the USSR. In pursuing the goal of raising literacy levels to the greatest extent possible, the Arabic alphabet was viewed as a major obstacle because of its extreme inadequacy for transcribing languages of non-Semitic origin (cf. Nurmakov 1934: 3-4). From the Soviet authorities’ point of view, abandoning this alphabet would lead to the political advantage of disrupting the intergenerational writing tradition, rendering books and other material written in Arabic script unintelligible to new generations (Henze 1977: 375), as well as severing ties with the rest of the Islamic world and the conservative Muslim clergy (cf. Cardona 2009b: 138). Yakovlev maintained on this regard:
This alphabetic struggle—this was a struggle for a mass, anti-religious and proletarian alphabet [...] which would serve as a weapon for the spread of Soviet culture in the East—a struggle for culture and for the Soviet school and against the alphabet of the caste, sacralized by religion and used almost exclusively by the Muslim clergy. It was therefore a struggle against the theological schools and against the culture of bourgeois-religious content. (Yakovlev 1930: 33; my translation)
Similarly, in his 1934 text “The Latinization of the Alphabet—A Weapon of the Proletarian Revolution” (“Latinizacija alfavita—orudie proletarskoj revoljucii”), Nurmakov noted that the Arabic alphabet was no longer suitable for modern literacy needs and social, political, and cultural development because of the association with Islam and “Asiatic feudalism” formed by “exploitative groups” (Nurmakov 1934: 3; my translation). From a local perspective, however, there were valid reasons for retaining the Arabic alphabet, which was revered as an element of great cultural significance: it possessed primarily a symbolic meaning, linked to the sphere of Islam, but also a more practical one, relating to the possibility of establishing religious and cultural links with the countries of the Middle East and with the other more advanced Muslim peoples within the Soviet Union (Sebba 2006: 103).
In the second half of the 1920s, the Soviet authorities came to the conclusion that a reform of this writing system, while representing an advance over the previous situation of orthographic chaos, was still not sufficient to solve the specific technical difficulties of the Arabic script, which proved unsuitable for the goal of attaining mass literacy (Crisp 1990: 26). Anatoly Lunacharsky, the commissar responsible for the Ministry of Education, justified the need for script change by pointing to the serious difficulties of learning Turkic languages through the use of Arabic characters and insisting on the greater ease and appropriateness of Latin ones (Lunacharsky 1930: 21-22). In 1925, the Soviets finally decreed that the hitherto Arabic-written languages of the Union would soon be subjected to a process of alphabetic Latinization (Henze 1977: 376).
In the early 1920s, Soviet Azerbaijan was the most developed Turkic nation in terms of industrialization and modernization, and it is no coincidence that the idea of script reform received strong support and reinforcement precisely in this country. In fact, efforts had been made to introduce a Latin alphabet in Azerbaijan already in the 19th century: for instance, Mirza Fatali Akhundov, an eminent writer, had tried to adapt Latin characters to the specificities of the Azerbaijani language, and had published in 1857 a small pamphlet in Persian expressing his positive opinion of such a graphic solution (Caferoğlu 1934: 121).
During a meeting with the head of the Latinization Committee of Azerbaijan, S. Aghamaly-Oghlu, in the early 1920s, Lenin himself became convinced of the advantages of implementing this measure, which in his view would enable a greater penetration of revolutionary ideas (cf. Crisp 1990: 26). Since the Turkic languages possessed phonemes not represented by the Latin alphabet of the time, Soviet linguists developed a new writing system which would have allowed speakers of the closely related Turkic languages to easily communicate with each other through the written form. In 1922, this writing system was proclaimed by Lenin as the “Great Revolution in the East” (“Velikaja revoljucija na Vostoke”) (Yakovlev 1930: 34), and in the same year the new Latin-based alphabet was introduced in Azerbaijan by decree under the name of yeni yol (“new way”), a fact strongly praised by local intellectuals (Crisp 1990: 26).
In 1926, the first Turcological Congress was held in Baku, where the Latinization of all the Turkic languages of the USSR was officially declared. This event was followed one year later by the adoption of the unified “new Turkic alphabet” (Winner 1952: 136), or Jaŋalif, which was almost identical to the one that was soon to be adopted in Turkey (1928). The intention was to create the conditions for facilitating cultural contacts among people of common Turkic origin2 and for disseminating the ideas of the proletarian revolution more effectively.
The decisions of Turcological Congress, together with the realization of the alphabet reform in Turkey, were major factors supporting the Latinization process in the USSR. Only in the Georgian and Armenian Soviet Republics were the native alphabets tenaciously defended (Alpatov 2001: 15); elsewhere in the Caucasus, as in Vladikavkaz and Nalchik, the idea of Latinization was enthusiastically welcomed already in the early 1920s (Yakovlev 1930: 12). The conviction of the imminent triumph of the world revolution nourished the idea of creating a universal alphabet on a Latin basis (ibid., 31). From 1927 to 1930, the unified Latin alphabet was adapted to all Turkic languages of Soviet Central Asia as well as to other peoples of Turkic origin living in the Altai region: the consequences in terms of culture and literacy were remarkable, especially among the Uzbeks (Henze 1977: 377-8).
In a way similar to the Soviet case, the script change in the Turkish language was part of Atatürk’s broader literacy reforms, which aimed to dissolve the political and cultural barriers that had separated the common people from the educated and privileged classes for centuries (Bernal 2007: 182). The success of this reform was in some ways proportional to the previous inadequacy of the Arab-Persian alphabet as a medium for transcribing the Turkish language (Lewis 1999: 27).
From the 1920s to the first half of the 1930s, enormous resources and energies were mobilized in the USSR to create new Latin-based alphabets, which were eventually adopted for some seventy languages of various families and branches, not only Turkic ones. In parallel, in 1930, a group of linguists led by Yakovlev developed a Latin-based alphabet for the Russian language itself in collaboration with the All-State Central Committee of the New Alphabet (Vsesojuznyj Central’nyj Komitet Novogo Alfavita [ VCKNA]), active between 1925 and 1937, first in Baku and then in Moscow (Alpatov 2015: 2-3). The Latin alphabet became so popular as an ideological propaganda tool that it was historically renamed the “alphabet of the revolution” or the “October alphabet” (Nurmakov 1934), in a utopian and universalist vision (Hacıoğlu 2020: 20).
In this political and ideological climate, the idea of “Latinizing” the Russian as well as the Ukrainian and Belarusian languages (Duličenko 2001 174-5), which in the meantime continued to be written in their Cyrillic alphabet, also gained popularity. In 1929, a special subcommittee of the People’s Commissariat for Public Education (Narodnyj komissariat prosveščenija [NARKOMPROS]) was established under the leadership of Yakovlev himself (Alpatov 2001: 15): the prevailing belief was that the Latin alphabet, by virtue of its revolutionary character and its infinite possibilities of adaptation, could be used for writing any language, even the smallest one (Nurmakov 1934). In parallel, it was felt that by retaining the Russian Cyrillic alphabet, Russia would have distanced itself not only from the West, but also from its own East, as the peoples of the USSR increasingly adopted Latin-based writing systems. The practical realization of the Marxist ideal of world revolution also found expression in a kind of “ideology of letters” (Boneva 2001): the objective was to achieve written unification in order to better control the entire Soviet territory.3 The introduction of a Latin alphabet for the Russian language appeared hence to be an urgent and timely matter (Lunacharsky 1930).
