The Gospel riots (, Evangelika), which took place on the streets of Athens in November 1901, were primarily a protest against the publication in the newspaper Akropolis of a translation into modern spoken Greek of the Gospel of Matthew, although other motives also played a part. The disorder reached a climax on 8 November, "Black Thursday", when eight demonstrators were killed.
In the aftermath of the violence, the Greek Orthodox Church reacted by banning any translation of the Bible into any form of modern demotic Greek, and by forbidding the employment of demoticist teachers, not just in Greece but anywhere in the Ottoman Empire.
The riots marked a turning-point in the history of the Greek language question, and the beginning of a long period of bitter antagonism between the Orthodox Church and the demoticist movement.
Linguistic background: the rise of demoticism
Introduction of katharevousa By 1901, the long debate known as the Greek language question had been underway for 135 years. Initial hopes that Ancient Greek itself could be revived as the language of the newly liberated Greek nation had proved illusory; modern spoken or "demotic" Greek had evolved far from its ancient roots, and the two languages were now mutually incomprehensible.
As a compromise, a grammatically simplified version of Ancient Greek known as katharevousa glossa ("language that tends towards purity") had been adopted as the written language of the new state in 1830. This meant that the spoken and written languages were now intentionally different. It was hoped that written katharevousa would provide a model for imitation, and that spoken Greek would naturally "purify" itself by becoming more like this written form, and therefore more like Ancient Greek, within a matter of decades. To provide additional motivation, the current spoken or demotic Greek was widely condemned as "base" and "vulgar", the damaged product of centuries of linguistic corruption by subjection to Ottoman "Oriental despotism".
After 50 years, spoken demotic still showed no sign of becoming "purified" into something more like Ancient Greek. On the other hand, katharevousa was proving unsatisfactory in use as a general-purpose written language. Scholars could not agree on its grammatical rules; and as a purely written language with no native speakers, it could not evolve a natural grammar of its own. Its Ancient Greek vocabulary could not be used to write about the objects and events of ordinary life without sounding stilted and unnatural.
Ancient Greek in schools The problem was compounded by the educational system. Until 1881 only Ancient Greek—not even katharevousa—was taught in Greek primary schools, continuing the tradition of the Greek Orthodox Church, which had exercised an effective monopoly over education for centuries. (The church had always taught the ancient koine Greek of the gospels and the Divine Liturgy.) Children thus had to learn to read and write in a language they did not speak, or even hear outside church. This had been acceptable in previous centuries, when the schools had concentrated on training future priests; but it could not provide universal popular literacy.
Demotic renaissance By 1880, many were beginning to feel that katharevousa had outlived its usefulness. Kostis Palamas led the New Athenian School in a renaissance of demotic poetry; Roïdis pinpointed the deficiencies of katharevousa, and coined the word diglossia to describe the unhealthy split between the spoken and written languages; and finally, in 1888, Ioannis Psycharis published My Journey, which transformed the language debate.
Psycharis and My Journey Psycharis proposed the immediate abandonment of katharevousa and the adoption of demotic for all written purposes. He did not reject the relationship with Ancient Greek; on the contrary, as an evolutionary linguist, he argued that spoken demotic really was Ancient Greek, merely two thousand years further along in its evolutionary history. As a Neogrammarian, he believed that the essence of language was passed on by speech rather than writing, and he regarded katharevousa as an artificial construct rather than a true language.
Many agreed with him up to this point. But Psycharis went further: if demotic were to be used as the written language of a modern state, it would need a larger technical vocabulary. Educated everyday speech in the 1880s simply borrowed such terms from written katharevousa (for example: the word , "evolution", was altered to to conform to the morphology of spoken demotic).
Psycharis rejected all such borrowings. Instead, he coined the word , which he claimed was the word spoken Greek would have evolved for the concept of evolution if it had been free of the corrupting influence of katharevousa. He created many such words on the same principle; his declared aim was to set up a revitalized, scientifically derived demotic as a new written standard based entirely on the spoken language, isolated from katharevousa and independent of it.
Some found the new coinages ugly and unnatural: "Psycharis' versions sounded like mispronunciations of learned words by uneducated people, who would be unlikely to be familiar with many of these words in the first place." Others were inspired by Psycharis' vision and became enthusiastic supporters of his version of demotic. Notable among these was Alexandros Pallis, whose translation was to play a leading part in the events surrounding the Gospel Riots.
Psycharis is widely credited with turning demoticism from an idea into a movement, which steadily gained strength during the 1890s. Although he met some opposition, it was at first mainly good-humoured, constructive, and centred on linguistic and cultural issues.
Linguistic situation in 1896 By 1896, the situation might be summarized as follows: Ancient Greek was established firmly in the Church, in secondary schools, and also in primary schools (with some katharevousa there since 1881). Katharevousa was still used for every kind of administration and for non-fiction literature, but in prose fiction, it was just beginning to give way to demotic. In poetry, demotic had taken the lead.
The supporters of katharevousa were on the defensive, but the demoticist movement was split between the "extreme" demoticists spearheaded by Psycharis and Pallis, and the "moderate" demoticists who were less doctrinaire, and much more tolerant of borrowing from katharevousa (these moderates would finally win the language debate, 80 years later).
Religious background: previous gospel translations
The Eastern Orthodox Church had never had theological objections, in principle, to translation of the Ancient Koine Greek gospels into a more modern form of Greek closer to the spoken language. "The first translation appeared in the 11th century and until the beginning of the 19th century as many as twenty-five had been published. Some of these translations were officially solicited by the Patriarchate at Constantinople, while others were the work of prominent theologians and monks. The main characteristic of these translations, solicited or not, was that those who undertook them were members of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Hence, they did not pose a direct threat to the authority of the church but merely a challenge, aiming at making it more open-minded and receptive to the changing times."
This situation, however, began to change in the years following 1790, with the expansion in number and reach of the Protestant missionary societies. These societies opened missions all over Greece, the Levant, and the Near East, bringing with them (especially after 1830) new translations into the local vernacular languages.
The Eastern Orthodox Church regarded these Protestant-sponsored translations as attempts at proselytism (i.e., from one Christian denomination to another Christian denomination), and therefore as a direct threat to its religious authority. Accordingly, in 1836 and 1839 two encyclicals were issued by the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople (and approved by the newly independent Autocephalous Church of Greece) commanding that all translations undertaken by "enemies of our faith" should be confiscated and destroyed. At the same time, all previous translations, even if undertaken by "our co-religionists", were condemned.
These measures were successful in curbing the activities of the Protestant missions. However, the fact still remained that most Greeks could not understand the Gospels in their Ancient Greek form, a problem that had been publicly recognised by some senior figures in the Orthodox Church at least since Theotokis had published his Kyriakodromion in prototype katharevousa in 1796. Accordingly, some scholars within the Orthodox establishment continued to work on translations even after the Patriarchal encyclicals.
The most notable of these was Neofytos Vamvas, head of the School of Philosophy, and later Dean, of the University of Athens. Vamvas had been a close friend and follower of Korais in Paris, and over the years 1831–1850, he led a small team of scholars in producing a translation of the Old and New Testaments into the "Pan-Hellenic" katharevousa of the time — not the spoken language, but close enough to it, it was hoped, to influence everyday speech and make it a little more like Ancient Greek.
However, despite the thoroughly patriotic Pan-Hellenic ideals behind the undertaking, the appearance of this translation in 1850 sparked bitter controversy—not least because, in the absence of local Greek backing for such a "radical" project, it had been sponsored by the British and Foreign Bible Society. In the end, it was not approved for public use until 1924; but its very existence, and the high repute of its creators, kept alive the prospect of a "respectable" katharevousa translation of the Gospels.
By the late 1890s katharevousa had completely lost the connotations of enlightenment republicanism it had carried in the days of Korais and Vamvas. By contrast with the more 'hairy' forms of demotic now in circulation, it seemed the soul of respectability and orthodoxy; and when the religious Anaplasis association requested approval for a translation of the Gospel of Matthew into "simple katharevousa", this was granted by the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople in 1896, and by the Holy Synod of the Church of Greece in 1897. The translation was published in 1900.
After this decision it could plausibly be argued that the overall ban on translations announced in the encyclicals of 1836 and 1839 was no longer in force.
Queen Olga's translation of the Gospels Origin of the translation
Olga Constantinovna had served as Queen Consort of the Hellenes since her marriage in 1867 to King George I of Greece. Only 16 when she first arrived in Greece after the wedding, she had won the respect of her adopted country by learning Greek within a year and engaging in a wide-ranging programme of charitable and educational work, which did much to maintain the prestige and popularity of the Greek monarchy.
However, as the decades passed and the 'Bulgarian threat' loomed larger in the north, her close family ties to the Romanov dynasty of Russia began to make her an object of suspicion to those who saw, or claimed to see, Pan-Slavic conspiracies behind every setback. After the trauma of Black '97, these rumours of conspiracy became much more widespread, and therefore more useful to political opponents of the monarchy.
Queen Olga undertook her translation of the Gospels from the best of motives. In the aftermath of Black '97, she had spent much time in the military hospitals, at the bedsides of the wounded soldiers of the defeated army. However, when she tried to raise their spirits by reading the Gospels to them, she discovered that few could understand the Ancient Greek words; they called it "deep Greek for the learned".