Читать книгу: «The Alphabet of Discord»
ibidem-Press, Stuttgart
Contents
PREFACE
ILLUSTRATIONS
1. INTRODUCTION
1.1 The Balkan space between problems of multiplicity and claims of homogeneity
1.2 The role of writing and of the “Other” in the national discourse
1.3 Methodological considerations: sources and approaches
1.4 Semiotic and relational aspects of alphabets and nationalism
Section I
2. THE RECEPTION OF THE ABECEDAR PRIMER (1925) IN BULGARIA
2.1 Issues related to the adoption of new writing systems
2.2 Post-imperial national identity dynamics
2.3 The situation in Aegean Macedonia after World War I
2.4 The publication of the Abecedar (1925)
2.5 Some peculiarities related to the characters of the Abecedar
2.6 The “involvement” of Cyril and Methodius
2.7 Conclusions: the fate of the Abecedar after 1925
3. THE “LATINIZATION” IDEOLOGY AND THE BULGARIAN DEBATES
3.1 Introduction: issues of script change
3.2 The Latinization ideology in the Soviet Union
3.3 The Latin alphabet as a “modernizing” tool in the Balkans
3.4 The positions in support of Latinization in Bulgaria
3.5 The positions in defense of Cyrillic: contextual and internal factors
3.6 Defensive and symbolic motivations rejecting Latinization
3.7 Technical imperfections of the Latin alphabet
3.8 Conclusions: the national character of the alphabet
4. THE CONTRAST BETWEEN ARABIC AND LATIN SCRIPTS AMONG THE BULGARIAN TURKS
4.1 The impact of the Eurasian alphabet reforms on Turkey
4.2 The ambivalent status of the Latin alphabet in Bulgaria
4.3 Language and script restrictions for the Turks of Bulgaria
4.4 Conclusions: the disruption of writing practices
Section II
5. SERBO-CROATIAN IN TWO SCRIPTS: DIGRAPHIA, “ALPHABET SYNTHESIS” AND BILITERACY
5.1 Linguistic and historical introduction
5.2 Post-war alphabet ideologies: four parallel trends
5.3 The influence of the “pro-Latinization” factors
5.4 The first proposals of “alphabet synthesis” appearing in Život i rad
5.5 The “Yugoslav alphabet” by Pavle Ž. Radivojević
5.6 Reactions to the “mixed alphabet” proposals
5.7 Živaljević’s rejection of the Yugoslav alphabet and Trivunac’s defense of Cyrillic
5.8 Conclusions: the developments of the alphabet question in Yugoslavia
6. CYRILLIC AT WAR: SCRIPT IDEOLOGIES IN THE INDEPENDENT STATE OF CROATIA, 1941-1945
6.1 From unitarian ideologies to assertions of difference in the language field
6.2 The development of the language situation before the NDH
6.3 “Cyrillicide” in the Independent State of Croatia
6.4 Writing ideologies between purism and denialism
6.5 The “Orientality” of the Serbs and the role of the Glagolitic alphabet
Section III
7. THE REDISCOVERY OF GLAGOLITIC: FROM REGIONAL TO NATIONAL PHENOMENON
7.1 The new signification context of the Glagolitic alphabet
7.2 The alphabet issue during the period of socialist Yugoslavia
7.3 The creation of the Aleja Glagoljaša in Istria and the role of Zvane Črnja
7.4 The rebellious and democratic character of Glagolitic
7.5 The universal value of regional Istrian culture
7.6 The Glagolitic as a marker of continuity and prestige after the end of Yugoslavia
7.7 The institutionalization of the Glagolitic alphabet by the Croatian state
7.8 Glagolitic as a national symbol in an “exclusivist” sense
8. THE MODIFIED STATUS OF CYRILLIC IN POST-SOCIALIST CROATIA AND SERBIA
8.1 Introduction: Issues of biscriptality
8.2 The first changes in the status of the Cyrillic alphabet
8.3 The Serbian case: will bialphabetism survive?
8.4 The destruction of allographic traditions
8.5 Croatian reactions to the bialphabetic plaques in Vukovar
8.6 The Serb minority in Croatia as the “Other”
8.7 The relevance of the public writing context
8.8 The multigraphic character of the Croatian writing tradition
8.9 Conclusions: patterns of symmetrical differentiation
Section IV
9. BULGARIAN CYRILLIC BETWEEN TRADITION AND MODERNITY: THE “KRONSTEINER AFFAIR”
9.1 Introduction: the post-socialist ideological context in Bulgaria
9.2 The first debates on writing issues in the late 1990s
9.3 The origins of the “Kronsteiner affair”
9.4 Bulgarian Cyrillic between “Europhilia” and “Russophilia”
9.5 The issue of alphabetic coexistence in the European context of pluralism
9.6 Cyrillic as a “communist” alphabet
9.7 Bulgarian institutions against Kronsteiner
9.8 Further reactions in the periodical and scientific press
9.9 Moderate positions on opening to the Latin alphabet
9.10 Conclusions: open issues of transliteration
10. THE POPULAR DIMENSION OF THE CYRILLIC ALPHABET AND THE REDISCOVERY OF GLAGOLITIC
10.1 The “Kronsteiner effect”
10.2 Cyrillic and modern technologies
10.3 The link between Cyrillic and capitalism and the Bulgarian typefaces
10.4 The popularization of Cyrillic and the May 24 celebration
10.5 Conclusions: the revitalization of Glagolitic and “ethnogenetic” questions
11. FINAL NOTES
11.1 The relevance of the post-imperial and post-socialist factors
11.2 The symbolic dimension of the alphabet in the Balkans
12. LIST OF REFERENCES
Primary Sources
Official Legislative Sources
Secondary Sources
PREFACE
This book examines a series of issues related to the use of alphabets in the construction of national identity in the Balkan region, with a special focus on Bulgaria and Croatia. It does so by following the spread of different ideologies related to writing systems over a period of about a hundred years (1918-2017). Through the comparative and diachronic study of the symbolism of the alphabet in its modern variants, this work aims to help shed light on relevant questions related to processes of nation building in the Balkans and the linguistic (“alphabetic”) rights of ethno-linguistic minorities, focusing on the important relationships linking writing systems, culture and society. The analysis opts for a large time span in order to register the recurrence of significant elements in different socio-political contexts in both countries, mainly after moments of political crisis or powerful socio-cultural change.1 The aim is not to endorse or discredit the truthfulness or legitimacy of particular cultural traditions or identity discourses, but to problematize the value of the alphabet as a cultural element on a symbolic level and, within the “national historical imagination,” for the collective consciousness of a country (cf. Marinov 2011: 9-10)
The book starts with an introductory section (chapter 1) that explains the peculiarities of the post-imperial and post-socialist context in the Balkan Peninsula in terms of nation-building processes and the position of ethno-linguistic minorities. I then illustrate the importance of writing systems’ symbolic dimension and describe the methodology for considering different “textualities.” Finally, I comment on the disciplinary approaches I have applied to the investigation of this topic, referring to the anthropology of writing, cultural memory studies and semiotic approaches.
Chapter 2 analyzes the debates that arose in Greece in the second half of the 1920s over the adoption of a Latin-based alphabet in place of Cyrillic for the language of the Slavophone communities in Aegean Macedonia. The issue is contextualized within the complicated Balkan and European scenario after the end of the First World War, when the issue of protecting the linguistic rights of ethnic minorities first appeared in international law. I then illustrate the specificity of the school primer Abecedar, which was produced for these communities in Aegean Macedonia in the local Slavic language but using a Latin alphabet, something contrary to the Slavic Orthodox beliefs of the population, and I analyze the reactions of various Bulgarian intellectuals such as Ivan Shishmanov and Lyubomir Miletich.
Chapter 3 examines the debates about the advisability of replacing the Cyrillic alphabet for the Bulgarian language with a new, Latin script that took place in Bulgaria in the early 1930s. I emphasize the importance of the Soviet context of Latinization, linked to the theories formulated by the Russian linguist Yakovlev about the substitution of all non-Latin scripts by the so-called alphabet of the revolution. The debate is reconstructed through the analysis of some texts from this period, in particular the report “Cyrillic or Latin: The Bulgarian Character,” published in the journal Bulgarian Book in March 1930, which presents the opinions of representatives of the intellectual, graphic and political spheres on this issue.
Chapter 4 explores the issue of the problematic introduction of the Latin alphabet for the Turkish minority in Bulgaria following its adoption in neighboring Turkey in 1928. I explain why this event triggered anxieties in both the Bulgarian state and the more conservative strata of the local Turkish community, which affected the community’s “writing” and linguistic rights. In this context, I analyze the attitudes towards the Arabic and Latin alphabets that led to the prohibition of the Latin alphabet for this minority in the Balkan country in the interwar period, in an unprecedented constellation of interests between the Bulgarian authorities and Islamic religious powers.
Chapter 5 describes the “alphabet context” in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, later the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, in the 1920s and 1930s. In particular, I consider the issue of “biscriptality” as the official language policy and connect it to debates about the possibility of making the Latin alphabet the sole writing system in the country. I then consider the texts of three authors who see a possible solution to the situation of parallel use of Latin and Cyrillic in the creation of a new Yugoslav alphabet, an artificial and mixed writing system containing the characters of both alphabets in equal proportion. Although these proposals were not taken into account by official policy, they resonated in the debates of intellectuals of the time, a fact I demonstrate by looking at the reactions of intellectuals, such as those of the eminent philologist Aleksandar Belić.
Chapter 6 addresses the issue of the so-called “cyrillophobia” towards the alphabet used by the Serbian population, by considering the pre-war context and illustrative cases of the laws prohibiting its use enacted during the years of the independent Croatian state, the Nazi puppet state during Second World War. This issue is inscribed in the context of the growing rejection by a part of the Croatian cultural and intellectual world of any idea of linguistic and orthographic union with its Serbian counterpart. I refer to several texts that downplay the value of the Serbian script tradition and, in contrast, glorify the uninterrupted history of Croatian writing. Finally, I briefly analyze the parallel rediscovery of Glagolitic, including the 1944 case of the Glagolitic inscription in Zagreb Cathedral.
Chapter 7 focuses on the role of the Glagolitic alphabet in Croatia from the 1970s onwards, when the monumental project of the Glagolitic Alley was built in the Istrian hinterland. The motif of Glagolitic as a “democratic” writing system is analyzed in depth through the texts of the writer Zvane Črnja, who worked to promote local Istrian heritage and territory. I then address the examples of the institutionalization of Glagolitic as an autochthonous symbol at the state level in the post-socialist period, when this script became a fully national one in the official discourse of the independent country.
Chapter 8 addresses the question of the changes in the status of the Cyrillic alphabet in Croatia and Serbia in the post-socialist moment. I show that, if on the Croatian side this script was subjected to various forms of “marginalization” in the public sphere, in Serbia it became the core of some official and nationalist discourses. To this end, besides the first signs of discontent towards the Serbian Cyrillic heritage in the country, I consider the episode of “anti-Cyrillic” protests in the city of Vukovar in 2013/2014 and contextualize it in the process of Croatian nation-building. I also focus on the legacy of biscriptality in Serbia and briefly mention the debates on the status of the Cyrillic alphabet led by some nationalist actors.
Chapter 9 analyzes the debates that took place in Bulgaria at the turn of the century, triggered by the so-called Kronsteiner case, and trace the latter’s stages from the initial proposal of the Austrian Bulgarianist to introduce a Latin alphabet parallel to the Cyrillic one in the country. I interpret the polemic by looking at important issues of modernization and European integration that go hand in hand with conservative narratives about national identity in a sometimes contradictory way. In addition to the texts written by Professor Otto Kronsteiner, I present the reactions of representatives of the Bulgarian scholarly and intellectual world to the issue, as well as texts drawn from the wider public debate.
Chapter 10 illustrates a number of initiatives for safeguarding the Cyrillic alphabet in Bulgaria since the country’s accession to the European Union (EU), initiated and supported by politicians, intellectuals and even ordinary citizens. I refer to important technical and practical matters related to the use of this script in the context of the Internet, and I examine the theme of the May 24 National Day celebrations and the contemporary ideological value of the Cyrillo-Methodian work (the creation of the alphabet) in the national discourse. In addition, I briefly mention the recent rediscovery of the Glagolitic alphabet in Bulgaria and its use for the purpose of “ethnogenic” affirmation by the right-wing political party Ataka.
All of these case studies share similar structural features, a fact that supports my hypothesis regarding the relevance of the alphabet in legitimating certain kinds of identity rhetoric in the context of socio-political turning points. At the same time, they substantiate the idea that alphabets represent an element of particular importance in the Balkan world, intertwined with some “ethnosymbolist” (Smith 2009) identity dynamics active in the post-imperial and then post-socialist period of the affirmation of new political entities.
By looking at the rhetoric and ideologies of different countries in a longer-term perspective, this work does not aim to reduce the topic to a “unitary” or “monovalent” point, such as through simple oppositions and equations. Instead, by virtue of a broad comparative approach, I attempt to reconstruct the ideological background of individual historical-cultural contexts in which specific discourses and practices related to alphabets find their legitimacy. Based on a “relational” logic, such considerations uncover crucial contextual principles that need to be taken into account in order to obtain a more complete vision of the intricate Balkan space at two critical moments in the history of the last century.
1 Although some of the controversies covered had precedents in nineteenth-century debates in which writing systems played an important role, this book will focus almost exclusively on the period 1918-2017. Moreover, it is important to note that this book is concerned with the topic of writing systems and thus approaches the question of language in a very restricted way.
ILLUSTRATIONS
1. The Abecedar (1925) primer in Latin characters for the Slavic population of Aegean Macedonia, Greece.
2. Biliteracy practices in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes: the 1924 book by T.K. Pogoreljski Peregud published in Zemun.
3. The monument to Saint Cyril and Methodius in Sofia, Bulgaria (source: author).
4. One of the few surviving examples of Ottoman Arabic public writing in Bulgaria, here in Plovdiv (source: author).
5. Commemorative marble plaque in Latin and Glagolitic in the town of Vrbnik, on the Croatian island of Krk (source: author).
6. Graffiti appeared in Zagreb against the erection of official plaques in Cyrillic in the city of Vukovar (source: Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en).
7. Cyrillic Coca Cola label in Bulgaria during communism (source: socbg.com).
8. Official celebrations of the May 24 Day of Bulgarian Alphabet, Bulgarian Enlightenment and Culture festivity in Bulgaria, at Plovdiv University, 2013 (source: author).
1. INTRODUCTION
1.1 The Balkan space between problems of multiplicity and claims of homogeneity
Both the end of imperial rule in the Balkan Peninsula (Ottoman and Habsburg Empires) and that of socialism triggered complex cultural processes and political mechanisms, ushering in an era marked by the search for an “exclusive” national identity and by the clashes between the various nationalities that emerged from the ruins of the empires. During this period of upheaval, many cultural symbols and mythographies were deployed to meet the needs of modern nation-building processes, in order to create a more homogenous identity for the new nation-states, while many other elements were excluded from the prevailing rhetoric. Political and cultural elites undertook multiple operations of “rewriting” national history with the aim of restoring supposedly “pure” and “original” identities.
The implication was (and still is) that the true identity of the groups somehow lay in a past that had to be recovered: depending on the phase, this was a pre-imperial, medieval or pre-socialist past. In any case, it resided in an ethnically individual past characterized by glorious moments and precise, circumscribed markers of identity. The potential embodied by certain cultural traits was thus also evident at the ideological level: each successor state became much more national and homogeneous than it had been in the imperial period. The builders of the new nation-states in the Balkans continued to refer to the imperial past as a negative term of comparison, used “homogenizing” ideological tools, and often pursued discriminatory policies towards minorities.
More than a century after 1918, it is still useful and appropriate to study the politics of nation-building in the Balkan countries by taking into account the post-imperial context of their history at the political, cultural and ethnic levels, as this is an important aspect in the development of specific discourses of identity. In relation to their dynamics of “self-representation,” many countries in Southeast Europe (including Turkey) still seem to be applying a perspective that minimizes internal ethnic differences and the history of diversity that has shaped them for centuries. They prefer to affirm instead a unified and homogeneous vision of the nation that ideally makes them more similar to the countries of the West to which they aspire to belong and towards which they harbor a kind of inferiority complex that could never be fully appeased. Such notions of homogeneity, on the other hand, favor greater control of the state and national discourse over the population, whose potential diversity could endanger the ideal stability and historical mythography constructed in a largely mono-ethnic sense.
On the path of nation-building and identity reconstruction, the countries of the region availed themselves of various rhetorical strategies in public discourse, strategies which concealed the various existing identity ambiguities (mainly in the form of minorities) that could sound a discordant note in the idea of a direct correspondence between ethnic, linguistic and religious identities (Ivanov 2007). Hence, even after a number of years, there was still resentment within the Balkan majority groups against certain minorities (and their cultural elements, including language and alphabet), to whom the characteristics of “enemy” and “foreigner” were attributed. Not surprisingly, this phenomenon also characterized the post-socialist period, when countries had to resort to a new rhetoric of identity based on discourses of the “distinction” and “continuity” of their historical and cultural existence, in which elements such as the alphabet played and continue to play a crucial role.
In Croatia, the problematic history in question corresponds to that associated with the presence of the Serb minority, which is a “disturbing” reality that re-actualizes a part of the past associated with the figure of the enemy. In Bulgaria, on the other hand, the unwanted history is perfectly embodied by the Turkish minority, which brings back into the present the Ottoman, Islamic and foreign past from which the national narrative still tries to distance itself. In both cases, the minority group in question is the majority in a neighboring country, one which has enjoyed greater power in the past and was feared precisely because of this, having been accused of engaging in underhanded collaboration with the independent nation’s ethnic minority, as well as threatening renewed oppression and making territorial claims (Kymlicka 2002: 19-20).
These minority communities constitute a kind of Significant Other (Triandafyllidou 2003: 34-38), but in the negative sense, i.e. tabooed, troublesome, although indispensably part of an identity construction that uses the “Other” to affirm what one is not, to achieve a stronger affirmation of the nation and its values. As stated in the preface to Entangled History of the Balkans. Volume 3, a work that moves in a critical direction by attempting to deconstruct the individual historiographies (and mythographies) of the Balkan states:
they tell more or less the same story with different actors—a long and illustrious history with remarkable continuity starting from ancient times; the deeds of a unique people who demonstrated an immense capacity to survive in difficult circumstances and in endless struggles with enemies; a people who, even after falling under brutal domination and suffering horrible losses in lives and territories, managed to resurrect themselves again and again. (Daskalov Vezenkov 2015: 1)
This description, then, could apply to any country in the region that suffers from a kind of “victim complex,” whereby it experiences a conflicted and unresolved relationship with its past and carries the seeds of conflict into its present and potential future. These emotional aspects, which are at the same time subjectively experienced and collectively represented, have the power to trigger animosities and rigidities in large segments of the population, bringing to the surface traits of the past that people are still struggling to come to terms with.
Nationalism feeds on national myths (Đerić 2005), on ideas about a supposed historical continuity of identity that has remained unchanged in its essence over the centuries despite foreign domination and the multiple influences to which it has been exposed. The Balkan countries have invested a great deal in the (re)construction of specific narratives of their national history: no country in the region is an exception. National myths are largely tied to historical figures of great “mythopoetic” importance and to cultural elements of the greatest possible prestige, often claimed by several nations, in an exclusivist logic that is a fundamental feature of nationalism itself. In this context, it easily follows that the very idea of minority is problematic, as it can jeopardize the history and image of the nation as it has been propagated and conveyed since the beginning of the country’s new post-imperial (or post-socialist) history.1
In this context, the decline of the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires can be put in relation with the development of the ideal of the nation-state in Western Europe, compared to which these state entities appeared anachronistic. Indeed, the “heterogeneous” legacy of the post-imperial states was largely incompatible with the ethno-linguistic model of the nation-state, as they were multiethnic, multi-linguistic and often even multi-confessional territories (Dogo 1999: 10-15). The only type of identity that took its place was instead a nationalism based on the centralizing model of national unification of the eighteenth or nineteenth century, in which the diversity of identities found no room for legitimization (Hobsbawm 1997: 16).
1.2 The role of writing and of the “Other” in the national discourse
In the process of “positive identification” taking place in the countries of the region, consisting in selecting and highlighting all those cultural features that are perceived as prestigious and characteristic of the national community, the alphabet has proved to be a fundamental element. This is by virtue of the prestige it embodies in the eyes of an internal public that recognizes in it a history of continuity and distinction. Identification, however, is not possible without its negative aspect: the process of national self-definition has always been a process of differentiation from other nations, especially neighboring ones. In this respect, it is particularly relevant to analyze the attitudes propagated by national rhetoric towards the writing systems of the “Others.” Indeed, in order to create its own identity, each nation had to create its “antitype” from which to distinguish itself, since it is not enough to affirm who one is; it is equally important to define who one is not (Bugarski, 2009b: 106).
The relevance of the self-representational dynamics goes far beyond individual, social or cultural practices and acquires power at the political level, as these practices influence decision-making processes, the formation of public opinion, and hence the orientation of political parties themselves. Since nationalism presents itself as a “relational” ideology (Ivanov 2007: 2), it must be understood through the analysis of its context in the broadest sense, externally and internally, synchronically and diachronically. Discourses of identity in the region are still shaped by a specific notion of “foreignness” and, consequently, national rhetoric about the autochthonous writing systems has an impact on the construction of the image of the Other and on the role attributed to it as a possible obstacle in achieving a homogeneous vision of the nation. This factor also explains the interest in focusing on the search for origins, i.e. the ethnogenesis of the national people (Todorova 1996: 71), exploring the national past and distinguishing it as much as possible from that of the Other by insisting on certain features of symbolic differentiation.
The national writing tradition is sometimes used as genealogical “proof” when affirming the antiquity and continuity of the nation: historical facts that might undermine these ideals are thus downplayed or made part of a precise rhetoric of salvation, in a kind of teleological vision according to which the nation continued to fortify itself under the foreign yoke. Unsurprisingly, in the Balkan context, the countries that tend to glorify their linguistic and writing heritage are the same ones that somehow try to hide their contradictory relationship with part of their history, especially their minority communities. In the post-socialist context, EU candidate countries such as Croatia and Bulgaria were strongly pressured to adopt “Western” standards of multiculturalism and minority rights (Kymlicka 2002: 2-3). The interesting fact is that the history of these countries was permeated by conditions of multilingualism, multigraphism and the coexistence of different ethnicities and religions: certainly, the historical interreligious and intercultural experience of Balkan countries like Bulgaria and Croatia is much more remarkable than that of more “mono-ethnic” and religiously homogeneous states like France or others in Western Europe.
Nationalism is certainly a phenomenon determined and shaped by political, economic and social factors, but it would be naive to overlook another fundamental factor, namely its social psychological component (Druckman 1994: 44): in fact, it is also experienced concretely and reiterated metaphorically on many occasions. This means that the individual is also involved in practices of weaving the symbolic imagery associated with collective identity. The nation is hence shaped by the interaction between different levels of power, in a kind of continuous negotiation between the discourses of elites and the responses of the majority, as well as the possible reappropriations of the former by a minority (see Smith 2009: 19). Individuals in a given national community carry and maintain feelings, beliefs and attitudes towards their own nation: these subjective factors in turn influence the value they ascribe to other nations, which may be seen as more or less related and close to their own, or even as threatening actors, or as enemies.
The emotional, social psychological aspects of nationalism largely explain the emergence of stereotypes, which are understood as widespread and shared representations of self and other, and are functional for the maintenance of a certain identitarian “status quo” (Druckman 1994: 50). Often, the group perceived as different from the majority remains trapped in a fixed, even anachronistic representational category; in the Balkans, we find many examples of the use of labels referring to the prejudices and conceptual categories of the past: the adjective “Turkish” as pejorative (cf. Jezernik 2010), “Chetnik” or “Ustasha,” etc. This process is linked to continuous practices of “re-actualization” of specific values from a more or less distant past, which are functional to the construction and maintenance of the national image. With regard to understanding this phenomenon, it is particularly relevant to analyze the experience of a nation on a diachronic level and to look for analogies or differences in relation to situations from another, more or less distant, temporal context.
1.3 Methodological considerations: sources and approaches
Since this book focuses on issues of ideology and writing systems in the context of national identity construction, I intend to treat a number of different and heterogeneous textualities as objects of analysis. Although most of the examples I refer to are texts published by scholars and intellectuals who exercised some authority in the cultural discourse of their time, excerpts from literary works, as well as more widely disseminated media in the form of journalistic articles, are also considered. In addition, important official legal documents, state decrees, constitutional laws, and, albeit in a minimal way, the public space of “inscription,” in the form of the “linguistic landscape” of official public signage, are taken into account.
My assumption is that the circulation of discourses relating to writing systems takes place at three quite distinct levels of operativity. The first is embodied by the primary source, that is, the official and bureaucratic structure that produces laws and public declarations on matters of writing, and is therefore the most original level and the one closest to the source of ideology, that is, power. At the second level, that of cultural dissemination, to which most of this book is devoted, we find the texts and monuments produced by exponents of the cultural intelligentsia and by public and cultural institutions: academies of science and language, eminent writers and artists, and to some extent the media. It is extremely useful to examine the role of these actors in proposing a particular image of the nation that is consistent (or not) with that of the official rhetoric. Finally, the third level coincides with the socio-anthropological dimension, which refers to the attitudes cultivated by the wider public towards the national discourse, implying a possibility of re-appropriation that is to some extent subjective.
In this book there are only very brief references to the properly subjective aspect of the question, while much more space is devoted to examining the role of popular culture in propagating certain identity messages associated with the alphabet, that is, the question of the transformation of discourse from official to popular. This component of the analysis is considered fundamental in demonstrating how the so-called “operative level” (Malešević 2002: 74-75) of ideology is propagated through a much more effective and direct discourse and language than the primary, official one. Therefore, the level of ordinary and (seemingly) spontaneous practice, a context that might seem detached from the first two, actually represents the most obvious and evident reflection of the penetration of official discourse into the daily life of large segments of the population (Malešević 2013: 120-154).
The main inspiration for the development of this research was provided by the illuminating insights offered by the field of the anthropology of writing as practiced by its most eminent representative, Giorgio Raimondo Cardona (1943-1988).2 This branch of anthropology is the one that has so far paid more attention than any other to the symbolic, cultural and ideological aspect of writing systems (especially in: Cardona 1982, 1986, 2009 [1981], 2009a). It assumes that writing systems represent much more than a simple representation of sounds, bearing a fundamental symbolic dimension that is often underestimated, and which enables them to “emancipate themselves” from their linguistic context.3
Writing is understood as both a cultural and a social practice: written texts are central to culture conceived in the broad sense, which in turn is closely linked to society (Cardona 2009a: 64ff). The alphabet also proves to be a privileged site of symbolic production, becoming an effective means of reminding people who they are at the national collective level: in the Bulgarian and Croatian cases, as we shall see, this is fully expressed and linked to modern ideologies of state legitimacy. In the dissemination of identitarian rhetoric, the symbolic aspect of the alphabet plays an important role, stimulating national consciousness and internal cohesion through the use of elements such as writing, which is conceived as an “identity and symbolic marker” (cf. Malešević 2004: 26). Intellectuals, legitimized by the political sphere (cf. Smith 2009: 84-86), can indeed make certain textualities and messages decisive in propagating certain forms of ideologies: in the cases analyzed in this book, they correspond to “script ideologies.”
To understand how writing and written texts are produced and used by different actors in different contexts, we need to examine the values, beliefs and behaviors associated with different forms of writing (Barton & Papen 2010: 9).4 For this reason, an important focus is placed on those who hold power over writing culture and on the ways in which they engage in broader identity practices by perpetuating specific national ideological discourses and visions about the nature of writing in a certain alphabet. Writing is linked to the ethnic question in a variety of ways and represents a space through which particular symbols are spread. Often, the “autochthonous” writing system represents one of these symbols and hence becomes doubly crucial in the so-called process of the “symbolic cultivation” of identity (Smith 2009: 48-49). The written word also determines the awareness of past times and is thus seen as equivalent to history, to the collective memory of society (cf. Assman 2011).
Writing has been skillfully selected and brought into the collective consciousness through a narrative in which the motifs of historical memory are often transformed into ideological elements aimed at legitimizing the existence of a specific national identity as well as a kind of “political imagination” (see again Assman 2011: 111 ff.). Memory itself is exercised on a collective level through a process of symbolic cultivation; in the cases we will analyze, this corresponds to a “rhetoric of the alphabet” that feeds the collective consciousness and promotes the internal cohesion of the national community. In fact, the Bulgarians, but often also the Croats, claim to have become historically a nation only after the creation or adoption of their alphabet. The national historiographies of the countries of the region have thus contributed to revive a particular version of their history, focusing on very ancient times and making them the metaphor of a kind of exemplary “golden age” to be invoked in the era of national “rebirth” (Mishkova 2015: 271).
When dealing with issues related to writing systems, it is not possible to disentangle the latter from their most natural context, that of the language they convey. However, as has been pointed out (Sebba 2009: 35), sociolinguistics has not paid special attention to writing systems so far,5 even though “writing systems have obvious connections with subjects of great sociolinguistic interest, like identity and ethnicity” (ibid.). As far as the sociolinguistic aspect of alphabets in the Balkans is concerned, scholars such as Ranko Bugarski (1997) and Robert D. Greenberg (2004) are important exceptions; they have shown the importance of issues of language and the alphabet in collective representations in the years before the collapse of Yugoslavia, during the conflict, and, later, in the process of the affirmation of the new nation-states that emerged from the war.
1.4 Semiotic and relational aspects of alphabets and nationalism
If we intend to consider writing systems as symbols of ethnic (and/or national) identity, we must necessarily note that symbols do not exist in themselves: rather, they represent “meanings” according to specific needs and intentions and for a particular audience. Culture, conceived in the form of “webs of significance” (Geertz 1988: 11 [1973]), reveals itself in its essentially semiotic nature. Consequently, it can only be understood through an interpretive analysis that searches for the meanings it expresses for those who “inhabit” it. By applying this theory of a semiotic nature to the phenomena of the ideologization of alphabets, I attempt to understand the meaning that the various writing systems embody for their respective societies. Ideology itself, conceived according to the Geertzian theory, is but one cultural system with its own specific language to analyze.
Hence, in order to reconstruct a “framework of meaning” (in the semiotic sense; see Lotman 1985) for the societies in question, I insist on the need to take into account a plurality of contexts: national, socio-cultural, political (and geopolitical), international, as well as minority and even individual ones. The meaning of a given phenomenon can be deduced from the way it is positioned “systemically” (cf. Bateson 1977 [1972]) in relation to other semiotic objects: the (symbolic) meaning of certain events, phenomena and cultural elements thus corresponds to the position they occupy in the structure of their societies.
In this process, it should be noted how the historiographies of the Balkans turn out to be “still predominantly traditionalist and nationalist” (Daskalov & Vezenkov 2015: 1), perpetuating narratives that tend to overlook the contribution and role of neighboring countries in their history and cultural development, in a perspective we might define as “anti-contextual.” For this reason, I have attempted to take a completely opposite perspective in this work, trying to combine as many elements as possible in an overall view to define the complex historical and cultural context of interest.
Indeed, I believe that on a methodological level it is essential to approach the history of Southeast Europe from a relational point of view, since much of this territory has followed a common historical pattern of development. It would be unnatural and counterproductive to isolate particular countries, nations or ethnic groups in the process of analysis: what is needed, therefore, is a contextual or “ecological” approach (cf. Barth 1969: 19), which can also bring advantages when applied at the linguistic level.6 As has been remarked: “[i]t is only possible to understand the South Slav lands by paying attention to the context within which they are situated. The trajectory of their development needs to be explained in relation to wider processes, involving neighbouring states, the Mediterranean region, the continent of Europe as a whole and indeed the world” (Allcock 2000: 13).
1 In relation to this, it is interesting to note the following: “In fact, minority nationalism in the Balkans is perceived solely as exclusive majority nationalism in an embryonic stage” (Ivanov 2007).
2 He also developed the fields of sociolinguistics and ethnolinguistics in Italy.
3 There is also the field of the so-called “ethnography of writing,” which is closely related to the anthropology of writing. See, for example, Mancini & Turchetta 2014.
4 Certainly, even in countries using the Latin alphabet, there can be cases of disputes involving the spelling of the language. An important case is the opposition to the proposals in the 1990s concerning the modification of certain letters of the German alphabet (cf. Johnson 2005: 1-6). Furthermore, as far as Turkey is concerned, we can recall the value assumed by the three forbidden letters of the Kurdish alphabet in recent years in conjunction with the struggle for recognition of the Kurdish cultural identity in the country. Basically, it can be seen that, in a way similar to alphabetical changes, spelling reforms are not easily accepted, especially in the context of communities using highly standardized languages (cf. Gundersen 1977). However, spelling debates are generally quite different from script debates, where much more is at stake, with far more significant implications.
5 One of the most important exceptions is Fishman 1977, a collection of studies devoted to various cases of alphabetical and orthographic reforms in languages from different parts of the world.
6 For example, in the consideration of the so-called “Balkan Sprachbund.”
SECTION I ALPHABETIC DISPUTES OF THE 1920s AND 1930s IN BULGARIA
2. THE RECEPTION OF THE ABECEDAR PRIMER (1925) IN BULGARIA
2.1 Issues related to the adoption of new writing systems
In the aftermath of the First World War and of the dissolution of the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires, the Balkans still stood out as a region characterized by high levels of cultural, ethnic, linguistic and “graphic” diversity. If we consider the number of scripts present in the peninsula at that time, we find almost ten different writing systems in use: Serbian and Bulgarian Cyrillic, Greek, Latin, bosančica, Arabic characters modified to write the Turkish, Bosnian, Albanian and Greek languages, traces of the Glagolitic alphabet, Hebrew characters to write the Judeo-Spanish language and Yiddish, and Armenian characters used by the Armenian minorities (cf. Zakhos-Papazahariou 1972: 146, Parmeggiani Dri 2004: 12). This phenomenon was not to be found in any region of Western Europe but was comparable to the situation in some parts of Central and Eastern Europe and must therefore be viewed as a feature of a highly diverse post-imperial world, for whose comprehension the conceptual tools derived from the history of the Western world reveal themselves often insufficient (Barkery 1997: 100).
The composite cultural and linguistic character of the region has been considered by some as an obstacle to harmonious development and progress (May 2013: 24). The nineteenth-century liberal John Stuart Mill, for example, stated in 1861 that “[f]ree institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities (…) especially if they read and speak different languages (...) The boundaries of governments should coincide in the main with those of nationalities” (cit. in Edwards 2009: 189). Mill’s opinion appears to have been largely undermined by a Western Eurocentric vision, based on a concept of the nation-state that has become more and more dominant since the 19th century. It could also be interpreted as the symptom of a sort of “orientophobia”1 which applies reductionist criteria to the idea of civilization and to a certain extent fulfills the interests of domination. In fact, it is much easier to exercise political or even just “conceptual” control over a part of the world when it presents itself as linguistically, ethnically and confessionally homogeneous, and not jeopardized, as in the Balkans, by “[s]cores of tongues, dialects and religions,” which determined a kind of “handicap of heterogeneity,” as one observer affirmed (Roucek cit. in Bardos 2013: 27).
Unfortunately, the influence exerted on the socio-political development of the Balkan countries by this view of heterogeneity as an unwelcome “imperial remnant,” capable of hindering the implementation of modern state structures, was immense (see, for example, Todorova 1996: 45-77). The peoples of the region, in fact, “internalized not only the geopolitical split between Western and Eastern Europe, but also the split between Europe and the Orient” (Bjelić 2011: 12). Becoming Westerners implied adopting both the values of the West and the stereotypes it nurtures of the East (ibid., 14). Predictably, this attitude produced various phenomena of “identity short-circuiting,” characterized by persistent internal negations, suppressions and conflicts.
In this respect, it is interesting to note the influence of these Western-influenced concepts of identity on the development of alphabet ideologies. A paradigmatic case is that of Romania and its transition to the Latin alphabet after centuries of using the Cyrillic alphabet in the second half of the nineteenth century (cf. Lörinzci 1982). This was indeed a deliberate act of “rapprochement” with the European and Western world, probably also dictated by the hope of gaining important cultural advantages, and a more favorable recognition on the part of the “Significant Others”2 of the West.
In this context, consideration of the proposals to adopt alternative writing systems is an essential part of the analysis of alphabet ideologies. With regard to the languages of Southeast Europe, between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, the adoption of new writing systems played a major role in the history and development of many states in the region, such as Romania (in the 1860s), Albania (1909) and Turkey (1928). The affirmation of a certain relationship of independence between writing and language (Wellish 1978: 41-44) set an important and momentous precedent: a language that had appeared in a particular alphabet could begin to be written at any time using another writing system, one that definitively replaced the previous one.
Against this background, the publication in 1925 of the so-called Abecedar, a didactic text intended for the Slavic-speaking population of Aegean Macedonia, led to a lively dispute involving Bulgarians, Serbs and Greeks, as well as members of the League of Nations. At the heart of the controversy was the fact that the text had been written in Latin rather than Cyrillic characters. The dispute over the Abecedar was the first opportunity in independent Bulgaria to discuss the question of whether or not to accept an alternative writing system for the national language. In this country, the condemnation of the Latin alphabet was accompanied by a passionate defense of Cyrillic. The testimonies of authoritative Bulgarian scholars of the time, such as Ivan Shishmanov and Lyubomir Miletich, who actively participated in the debate on the Abecedar, prove that the Cyrillic alphabet was seen by Bulgarian society as an indispensable element of the national identity, playing a pre-eminent role in the collective self-representation practices of the post-war and post-imperial (Ottoman) period. The traditional writing system, which joined the delicate political debate related to the “Macedonian question,” was explicitly made part of a discourse about the country’s national and historical identity, imbued with strong symbolic cultural contents and values.
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 <r>, 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 <s> with the digraph <dz>, as well as today’s Macedonian Cyrillic letters <ќ> and <ѓ> with the digraphs <kj> and <gj>.
There are many other interesting aspects with reference to the letters in this manual, first of all the fact that the order of the letters is not exactly logical. The letter <b> is followed by <e> and not by <c>, undermining at the very beginning the title Abecedar itself; the letter <e> is followed by <v>, a fact which could prompt us to think that the authors were attempting to devise a new alphabetical order. The order of appearance of the 29 letters is in fact as follows:
| a | b | e | v | k | i | o | d | m | u | p | t | n | l | s |
| š | z | ž | r | j | î | c | č | g | f | h | ü | dz | dž |
This is then contradicted by the order on the last page of the first section (p. 34), which follows that of the Latin alphabet:
| a | b | c | č | d | e | f | g | h | i | j | k | l | m | n |
| o | p | r | s | š | t | u | ü | v | z | ž | dz | dž |
If we take a closer look, however, we note that there are 28 letters here, and therefore one is missing: it is the letter <î>. In short, there is a lot of confusion in this text, and the errors do not stop here.
As a general consideration, it is important to remark that, in the process of the creation of a new writing system, all efforts should be aimed at minimizing ambiguity while maintaining maximum simplicity for users (cf. Venezky 1977: 41-42). The work performed by the Greek linguists in designing the alphabet for the Slavophones in Aegean Macedonia was actually quite advanced on the purely technical (and theoretical) level, especially for the modernization of the language’s transcription system. This is true especially in comparison to the Bulgarian alphabet of the time, in which some letters that corresponded to mere orthographic archaisms remained (cf. Guentcheva 1999: 359).9 The latter made this writing system therefore not strictly phonemic, that is, based on the principle of “one letter, one sound.”
The combination of two or more letters to represent a single phoneme is generally considered, especially from a Cyrillic perspective, to be one of the major shortcomings of the Latin-based writing system (Wellish 1978: 47); in the case of the Abecedar, this element is certainly not the most important problem, as the obstacles to literacy in the Slavic-speaking community emerge in much more significant imperfections appearing in the text. In his review, Miletich cites a long series of examples from the pages of the primer in which words appear to be spelled incoherently, and notes that these inaccuracies represent a clear act of outrage by the Greeks against the Bulgarian script (Miletich 1925: 232).
It appears that the authors of the Abecedar did not pay too much attention to details and neglected the correct use of the writing system they had developed, probably due to a lack of time and attention, but perhaps also, one could assume, due to their own inability to handle a Latin alphabet they had not mastered very well. In this way, they undermined their own linguistic work and jeopardized the possibility of success for the use of the new alphabet by the target population, if that was indeed the goal of their efforts. According to Fishman (1977: xv), the creation of a new script becomes relevant only “insofar as it leads to the acceptance and implementation of the writing systems.” In our case, the decisions that taken in the Abecedar seem rather to indicate of a lack of will and seriousness in planning alphabet reform.
2.6 The “involvement” of Cyril and Methodius
As mentioned above, the use of the Latin instead of the Cyrillic alphabet provoked strong reactions in the Bulgarian press. In fact, once more precise information about the “character and tendencies of this primer” (Shishmanov 1926: 2) was released, anger seized all social circles, without distinction (ibid.). It is interesting to remark that the Greek authorities, in defending their choice, argued that Latin characters were easier to learn than Cyrillic and better suited to the sounds of the language; they recalled that Latin characters had already been used for writing other Slavic languages such as Croatian, Polish and Czech and that, by using some specific diacritical marks, they were able to make the most of the specific phonology of Slavic languages (Michailidis 1996: 339). It is clear that this comparison is accurate from a purely technical and linguistic point of view, but not from a cultural and historical one, since the Slavic peoples mentioned belong to the Catholic sphere of influence and, for them, unlike for the people of the Orthodox faith, the Cyrillic alphabet had no symbolic meaning.
In discussing the phenomenon of the creation of new writing systems, it is essential to evaluate the importance of some extralinguistic factors (Fishman 1977: xii): the application of a writing system to a language is impossible without the imposition of conventions that are accepted as binding by virtually all those who read and write that language (Wellish 1978: 41). In this case, the will of the people was certainly not taken into account in the choice of a Latin-based alphabet. It was not so much a question of abandoning fidelity to previous writing conventions, since the majority of the population were illiterate, but rather of breaking the bond with the Cyrillic alphabet of the liturgical books and icons in the local churches: that is, with the Orthodox religious tradition.
The Bulgarian and Greek governments, as well as the government of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, were all aware of the “power of writing,” that is, of the fact that writing, and therefore literacy, would have a great impact on the speakers of a language and their society (Biscaldi, Matera 2016: 91). They also knew that the conventions of writing systems were inherently sacred and that one writing system could only be replaced by another by force (cf. Wellish 1978: 42). In Bulgaria, the concern about alphabet reform in Latin letters for the Slavophone population in Greece was linked to the belief that this would represent a disruption in the cultural and religious tradition inaugurated by Saints Cyril and Methodius, and this would have extremely significant consequences for this minority’s identity. This was also the immediate reaction of the local Slavic population to the news of the publication of the primer in Latin characters, who exclaimed: “Are they also going to make us Catholics now?” (Kuševski 1983: 186)—a reaction which shows that use of the Latin alphabet was automatically associated with the Catholic sphere of influence.
In Bulgaria, on the news of the publication of the primer for the Macedonian Bulgarians, the philologist Miletich bitterly commented that it was not written “with their centuries-old Cyrillic alphabet, which they gave to the Slavic world through the Cyrillo-Methodian script, but with a kind of Latin alphabet” (Miletich 1925: 230; my translation). Moreover, Miletich criticized the very definition of Abecedar, which was in itself controversial: “The primer is called ‘Abecedar,’ a name that the Bulgarian population would hardly understand, since it is derived from the first letters of the Latin alphabet.” According to Miletich, the Greek government treated its Bulgarian subjects as “a new nation, a recently discovered one, without legitimacy, without its own writing and literacy, without its own literary tradition and standardized literary language” (Miletich 1925: 230; my translation).
In his text, the philologist Shishmanov addressed the Greek Ministry of Education and demanded an explanation for choosing the Latin alphabet for the Slavic people living on Greek territory. Since the Ministry recognized the existence of this minority, he wondered, was it not necessary to retain the Cyrillic script used by this population in all their “many and thriving” schools, whose existence preceded the Greek occupation? Shishmanov also insisted, much like Miletich, on the fact that the Slavic alphabet (referring in his case to the Glagolitic alphabet, not the Cyrillic) was, “as commonly known, created by the brothers Cyril and Methodius on the model of the Greek script.” He explained that the Greek authorities’ choice in 1925 was provoked by the strong fear on the part of Greek institutions of Bulgarian cultural—and hence political—influence. Consequently, the minority population was deprived of the possibility of reading books and newspapers printed in Cyrillic letters in Bulgaria, and was materially and symbolically isolated from its most “natural” context of reference. Shishmanov also raised a very practical question, wondering what would happen to the Slavic liturgical books if the Greeks were really to force the Slavophone minorities to use the Latin alphabet for education:
Must these also be translated into the Bitola-Prilep dialect and printed in Latin letters? And from where will “Slavic” priests be taken henceforth who know how to use the Latin alphabet? These disturbing questions have not been answered by the official Greek authorities because they have not thought about these implications at all. They knew very well that in the end it was a simple “bluff.” (Shishmanov 1926:14; my translation)
In the Bulgarian national conception of which both Miletich and Shishmanov were representatives, the population of Aegean Macedonia was seen as dependent on the Bulgarian cultural and religious sphere and therefore inseparable from the Cyrillic alphabet (see Tramontano 1999: 323). According to a vision associated with the Slavic Orthodox cultural tradition, indeed, writing exercised a function far beyond the mere graphic representation of phonemes, since alphabet and faith were intimately connected. This is not an exclusive feature of Slavic Orthodox culture, for in other Eastern Christian traditions, as well as in the Islamic world (and also beyond), the value of the written word is also extremely strong (see Cardona 2009b: 133), especially when it occurs in a form perceived as “native.” So, in addition to the Glagolitic alphabet for Bulgarians and Croats (as we will see in Chapters 7 and 10), the Cyrillic alphabet for Bulgarians, Serbs, Russians, etc., we also have the examples of the Armenian alphabet for Armenian communities worldwide (associated with the Armenian Apostolic Church; see, for example, Maksoudian 2006, Uluhogian 1996), the Georgian alphabet (see Gamkrelidze 1994) for Georgians, as well as the Ge’ez alphabet for Ethiopians and Eritreans (see Cardona 1986: 151) and their respective Tewahedo Orthodox Churches (see Bekerie 1997).
The value of the Cyrillo-Methodian mission can be understood by its “revolutionary” historical value: at a time when the dogma of the three languages (Biblical Hebrew, Latin, Greek) was in force for the transcription of the Holy Scriptures, a Slavic language was able to assert itself and gain legitimacy thanks to a new work of alphabetic creation. In Shishmanov, the desire to maintain the Orthodox cultural and writing tradition coexisted with a broad international commitment at the European level, as he was one of the founders of the so-called Paneuropean Union, an embryonic version of today’s European Union (cf. Koneva 2011). Shishmanov was a great advocate of the idea of a united continent, which included respect for the rights of minorities as a fundamental value. His support for the message of Cyril and Methodius probably also stemmed from his attachment to the deeply European ideals of protecting and promoting cultural and linguistic diversity in every part of the continent.
Cyril and Methodius were “invoked” not only by Miletich and Shishmanov. Reference to their work also appeared in the reaction of an anonymous reporter published in the Bulgarian press in the Macedonian region of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, Macedonian News (Nouvelles Macedoniennes) (Press of the Revolutionary Association VMRO), although the two saints were credited with creating the Cyrillic alphabet and not the Glagolitic one (cit. in Tramontano 1999: 324). The use of the Latin alphabet was also condemned by the pro-Bulgarian organizations of Macedonian refugees in Sofia, who demanded the immediate introduction of the Cyrillic alphabet (cf. Michailidis 1996: 336). In an article published in the daily Word on 15 October 1925, the Bulgarian politician and journalist Georgi Kulishev expressed his opinion on the subject, referring to the memory of the Cyrillo-Methodian mission:
The great work of Saints Cyril and Methodius has been eclipsed [...] three Greek specialists [...] have graced the Bulgarian people of Western Thrace and Macedonia with a new writing and a new manual for education. It is true that this writing is not so new—it is the Latin alphabet adapted to a not very beautiful cause, a semi-barbaric one. (in: Shishmanov 1926: 4; my translation)
In the same article, the author stated that the Abecedar represented something completely unheard of and “monstrous.” The Greeks had so achieved their goal that the Bulgarians had difficulty in recognizing their own language in the manual, a language subjected to “unheard-of tortures in their martyrology” (ibid.).
Similarly, in a text published in the journal Macedonian Review (Makedonski Pregled) in Sofia, the historian Georgi Strezov expressed his dissatisfaction with the way the Bulgarians were treated by the Greek authorities in Aegean Macedonia, condemning the violation of their cultural and national rights (Strezov 1926: 146). Strezov affirmed that such actions stemmed from the Greek will to uproot this minority from its land and to appropriate everything that was Bulgarian by every means at their disposal—“imprisonment, exile, pitchforks, primers”—and above all by banning their language: all with the aim of “de-Bulgarianizing” Macedonia. The Greeks hence aimed to eliminate all historical evidence of Bulgarian cultural presence in the area. “But we do not want to leave, we are obedient subjects of the Greek state, and we want only one thing—to pray to God in our mother tongue and to read books in Bulgarian” (Strezov 1926: 148; my translation).
The populations in Aegean Macedonia and Western Thrace that were considered “Bulgarian” by the above-mentioned authors already possessed their own written literary tradition, comprising books, newspapers, writers, printing houses, churches, clergy and schools, one which had reached an enviable level: in short, all the cultural characteristics of an advanced society (see also Rossos 2008: 147). The decision to introduce a different writing system and deprive them of such civilizational elements was incomprehensible to the Bulgarian public and unacceptable from a moral, linguistic, cultural and religious point of view. Referring to the population in question, Shishmanov asked: “What benefit could they derive from this Latin writing system? The result will be their inability to read not only a Bulgarian book, but also a Serbian or Russian book” (Shishmanov 1926: 9; my translation).
Certainly, one can conclude that the Greek commission did not adhere to what, in modern sociolinguistics, is considered to be the basis of linguistic and orthographic planning (cf. Fishman 1977: xv). In any project aimed at introducing a new writing system for educational purposes in a speech community, there are indeed a number of crucial decisions to be made: first of all, the choice between using an existing writing system and one created specifically for that language. The proponents of script reforms cannot decide arbitrarily on this fundamental aspect, but should take into account the reaction of the native-speaking population at all stages of the planning process (Berry 1977: 5).
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).
3.3 The Latin alphabet as a “modernizing” tool in the Balkans
In the Balkan Peninsula, the diversity of languages, dialects and alphabets, also in the form of local particularisms and syncretic practices, considerably diminished in the post-war period. With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the Arabic alphabet began to disappear from areas where it had been present for centuries as the writing system of the ruling authorities. Moreover, with the elimination of the Arabic alphabet in the new Turkish Republic, the Kemalists launched a decisive attack on Islam, which also marked the beginning of a new “cultural centralism,” aimed at belittling all local peculiarities from Thrace and Anatolia, whose literary traditions were strongly linked to the Arabic alphabet (Zakhos-Papazahariou 1972: 153-4).
In this connection, it is worth mentioning that only a few decades earlier, in Habsburg-administered Bosnia and Herzegovina, a proposal had been made to adopt Arabic characters for writing the Bosnian language at the official level, by using the so-called arebica, a writing system that had developed locally, and was based on Arabic characters (see, e.g., Huković 1986 and Lehfeldt 2001). The arrival of Habsburg rule and the German language had determined the predominance of the Latin alphabet, and it was in this context that a reformed version of the arebica was formulated by the intellectual Mehmed Džemaludin Čaušević, which took the name of matufovica or mektebica. Interestingly, Čaušević implemented his reform on the basis of the Cyrillic alphabet, founding it on the phonemic principle proposed by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, by assigning to each of Karadžić’s graphemes a corresponding character in the Arabic alphabet. Čaušević believed that, in order to prevent the overwhelming of this writing system by the dominant Latin alphabet, it was essential to eliminate the orthographic chaos that had accumulated over time and to simplify the use of the Arabic script to transcribe the local Slavic language (cf. Selvelli 2015a: 215). In the hope of saving the Arabic alphabet from its probable disappearance, Čaušević and several other cultural representatives of similar Islamic background began using this alphabet in the bilingual periodical press (in Turkish and Bosnian) aimed at local Muslims (Huković 1986: 19).
Despite such attempts, the Latin alphabet was becoming increasingly welcome in the Balkans as well as in the Middle East as an indicator of modernization and was actively promoted by the more progressive sections of society. In the years following the First World War, rhetoric spread in Greece, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and, of course, Turkey, but also in Palestine, Iran, Egypt and many other countries about the value of this writing system in terms of literacy advancement, as evidenced by the text The Universal Adoption of Latin Characters (L’adoption universelle des caractères latins) (1934), a publication promoted by the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, a body of the League of Nations for the promotion of international communication and peace through mutual rapprochement also in the field of writing.
This context at least partly explains the Greek authorities’ decision to print the didactic text Abecedar in Latin letters (see chapter 2), since the ideologies of Latinization were linked to concrete proposals for a similar reform of the Greek language. Indeed, in the context of the educational reforms implemented by the Venizelos government (1929-1932), influential Greek intellectuals such as Dimitrios Glinos and Menos Philintas held the view that adopting the Latin alphabet would set the country on a path of cultural Westernization and put a definitive end to orthographic chaos by promoting literacy (see Bernal 2007). As stated by Philintas in a 1929 article that contained a practical proposal for the Latinization of the Greek language: “I do not think there is any serious reason (...) why we should not also adopt this reform, since the Turks, the Japanese [sic!] and some other nations have done it before us” (cit. in Bernal 2007: 179; my translation). In a text that appeared in 1931, Glinos similarly observed: “My personal opinion, as I have said before, is that we must adopt the Latin alphabet. I am convinced that this will finally happen ...” (ibid., 180; my translation).
The reasons why a script reform of the Greek language was never carried out are very similar to those which explain its missed adoption in Bulgaria: it would be very interesting to devote a specific study to the comparative analysis of these two cases, highlighting common elements in the national rhetoric and in the factors of resistance to script change. Another important factor, especially for Bulgaria, was the adoption of the Latin alphabet by Romania, which replaced the Cyrillic alphabet previously in use. Yet, although the country’s religious identity was bound up with the Orthodox Christian faith, its language did not belong to the Slavic family, but to the Romance one. The proposal to render it through a suitable writing system had been made on several occasions, and it was not surprising that ideological and pragmatic arguments led the country to opt for a Latin-based alphabet (cf. Edroiu 2015: 237). Significantly, Romania’s transition from Cyrillic to Latin was accompanied in 1873 by an edict affirming the “Latinizing” (or “Romanizing”) and “Christianizing” role of the country in the context of the “pagan” and “Slavic-Muslim” Balkans (Kolarz 1946, cit. in Fishman 1977: xvii). The Latin alphabet, equipped with many diacritical signs, began to be used in the 1860s, but Romanian orthography would not be standardized until 1954 (Wellish 1978: 54).
The last Indo-European language to undergo a process of Latinization in the Balkan area was Albanian (Şimşir, 2008: 38-43). Political emancipation in the country went hand in hand with alphabet reform: when the National Congress gathered in Monastir (now Bitola, North Macedonia) in 1909 decided to fight for autonomy from the Ottoman Empire, of which Albania was still a province, the symbolic choice was the introduction of the Latin alphabet (Elsie 2017). Previously, the Arabic alphabet had been used to write this language, and some local patriots had created original Albanian alphabets by mixing letters of the Greek and Latin alphabets, but without much success (Elsie 2017, Kumnova & Shabani 2010: 70).
Certainly, since the late 19th century, the dynamics of self-representation of ethnic identity in Southeast Europe passed through the choice of the graphic form of the language, which had an extremely significant and legitimizing value for Western eyes. Thus, the Latin alphabet became established in Romania, Albania, and, though not entirely, in the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, without Catholicism influencing this in any way: it was also adopted for languages such as Turkish, with which it previously had had no connection (cf. Zakhos-Papazahariou 1972: 149). In this case, its status actually stemmed from the fact that it was perceived as the alphabet of the most “civilized” countries, that is, those of Western Europe.
Nonetheless, there was also strong opposition to various Latinization proposals in the Balkans, and the animated debates in Bulgaria, Greece, and Yugoslavia made the implementation of these projects unfeasible. To some extent, this can be explained by the fact that writing systems in the Balkans were never conceived as a kind of impartial technology that could be adapted and changed to suit the needs of its speakers and writers. Most proposals for the introduction of a new script did not meet with any possibility of adoption, which shows that questions of script in the Balkans (as well as in the Caucasus in Georgia and Armenia, the only other examples of “resistance to script change” in the wider Eastern European space) were deeply rooted in discourses of identity linked to irrepressible ideological, religious and cultural dynamics. I will now illustrate the deep-rooted reasons for such ideological positions in the Bulgarian case.
3.4 The positions in support of Latinization in Bulgaria
In the late 1920s, the Abecedar affair (discussed in chapter 2) was still experienced as a fresh and sensitive wound in Bulgaria. In addition, the Turkish alphabet reform most likely came as a surprise: many would not have expected their neighbor and former ruler, seen as culturally “retrograde” and “oriental” (cf. Todorova 1997), to take steps towards the West in such a resounding and symbolic way. Added to this, the defeats suffered since the Balkan wars and the unresolved issues concerning Bulgarian minorities outside the country’s borders constituted a factor of deep frustration for Bulgarian public opinion.
As a consequence, one of the main features of post-war Bulgarian nationalism was its “defensive” stance (Todorova 2009: 182). On the one hand, Bulgarians had to prove that they were worthy of being classified and identified as a nation on the basis of the historical/political criteria adopted by Western Europe; but, on the other hand, they were concerned about losing their own identity, both politically (precisely in relation to the Macedonian question) and, as this case will show, in relation to the possible abandonment of a millennial writing tradition. In short, there was a delicate tension between the issues and forces of “tradition” and those of “modernization.” It is through this lens that we can interpret the important debate on the retention or reform of the Cyrillic alphabet that arose at the end of the 1920s and materialized, in particular, in the survey carried out by the journal Bulgarian Book in 1930, as well as in other texts published in those years.
As for the newly founded journal Bulgarian Book, its editors asked a number of experts and professionals for their opinion on the question of switching to the Latin alphabet. On one side were representatives of the graphics, printing and typography sector such as Aleksander Makedonski, Ivan Kadela, Vassil Zahariev, Stefan Kutinchev, T.D. Plochev; and, on the other, intellectuals and academics such as Stefan Mladenov, Elin Pelin, Petko Stajnov, Sirak Skitnik, as well as the politician Stoyan Omarchevski. However, the investigation did not include the representatives of the religious world or the Slavic paleographers, who actually had the closest relationship with the old Bulgarian book. The introductory words of the text reveal to the reader the reasons why the editorial committee decided to undertake the survey:
The prospect of the possible introduction of the Latin alphabet in Russia [...] brings the question of the alphabet also to our agenda. All the more so since it has recently become known that there is a similar discussion in Yugoslavia about the introduction of the Latin script throughout the country. (Balgarska Kniga 1930: 167; my translation)
The editors of the journal therefore invited a number of competent persons in public life to share their opinion as to whether the adoption of a new writing system was appropriate and opportune. The response of the experts was by no means unanimous, with positions in defense of the Cyrillic script and against the adoption of a Latin-based writing system clearly predominating. In favor of a new Latin script were Aleksander Makedonski, Elin Pelin, Petko Stajnov and Ivan Kadela, who justified their position on the one hand with a number of practical reasons related to the economy and printing, and on the other with cultural and ideological reasons connected with progress and modernity.
As for the reasons belonging to the first category, the most “technical” opinion belonged to the director of the National Printing Office Aleksandar Makedonski, who stated that if such a reform had really taken place in Russia, he would have backed the introduction of the Latin alphabet in Bulgaria (Makedonski 1930: 168). In clarifying this position, perhaps one of the few distinctly “pragmatic” ones among the experts involved, Makedonski noted that the Latin alphabet could be advantageous in the modern printing context, especially by virtue of the much simpler and cleaner forms of its characters. Latin, according to the expert, was not only “more beautiful and readable” but also cheaper in design and print: the same idea, written in Bulgarian, could be expressed by Latin characters, “with an economic advantage of 16 percent over Cyrillic” (ibid.)! In this context, Makedonski also noted that in the general typographic situation at that time, the choice of different Latin fonts seemed limitless, in contrast to that of Cyrillic ones.
It should be noted that Makedonski’s pragmatic arguments were to some extent similar to those used by Yakovlev in the USSR to justify his decision to reform the alphabet: the Russian linguist put forward not only arguments of a purely ideological nature, but also scientific and technical ones. Yakovlev himself had shown that printing with Latin instead of Cyrillic letters was much cheaper and resulted in an easier reading process (cf. Alpatov 2001: 2). In this framework, it must be kept in mind that Bulgaria was in a situation of serious underdevelopment as concerned the availability of typefaces, a fact attributed by Makedonski to the cultural disadvantage suffered by Bulgaria, compared with Western European nations: “[w]hile the Western peoples dedicated themselves to their culture, we were oppressed by a spiritual and political yoke. All our ancient literature went up in flames” (Makedonski 1930: 167; my translation).
Unfortunately for Bulgaria, when Russian graphic designers and printers began to work on Cyrillic fonts, the revolution broke out, followed by the rise of Latinization ideas. For this reason, according to Makedonski, if the Latin alphabet were introduced in Russia, the lack of Cyrillic letters would become even more serious and the Bulgarians would not have been able to fill the gap on their own. Bulgarians and Serbs were indeed small and poor nations, with limited need for typefaces. Makedonski explained that for this reason a Cyrillic-printed page resembled a “cobblestone pavement in whose holes we so often stumble, lost in reading” (ibid.; my translation). Moreover, he felt, the Serbs would probably soon follow the Russian example: “Will the Serbs not take the reasonable step of unifying writing and language in Yugoslavia, through the alphabet that the Croats already use?” (ibid., 168; my translation). In short, under such circumstances, the difficulties of printing with Cyrillic characters would become insurmountable for the Bulgarians, and the country would suffer very serious economic consequences.
In harmony with Makedonski’s opinion was that of Ivan Kadela, another exponent of the world of typography. According to Kadela, in order to judge the question of alphabet reform from the practical standpoint of his profession, it was essential to take into account the spread that Cyrillic and Latin characters would undergo. If the introduction of the Latin alphabet were effectively implemented for the Russian language, its adoption would sooner or later become necessary also in Bulgaria, especially since in neighboring Yugoslavia, within the “advanced Croatian culture,” the question seemed more topical than ever (Kadela 1930: 169). The development of original matrices from which new typefaces could be obtained was, in the opinion of the printer, an extremely laborious task, and so it appeared clear that the production of Cyrillic typefaces would imply much higher costs. Considering these practical reasons, therefore, any attempt to introduce a special Bulgarian alphabet would be doomed to failure.
The second category of motivations in favor of adopting the Latin alphabet were of a cultural and contextual nature, related to ideas and ideologies associated with the progress and modernization of the country. In this respect, Makedonski himself, supporting his “pro-Latinization” position, warned against the possible cultural isolation of the country, in a context where the whole Eurasian space, with the exception of Bulgaria, used the Latin alphabet. In short, the country would stubbornly maintain its tradition of the Cyrillic script, without having the means to print it in a manner appropriate to modern needs:
And, in this way, we will remain alone. Our means are not sufficient and will not be able to meet the needs and concerns associated with writing. And foreigners will not care for our culture. All these conditions are stronger than tradition and we will have to sacrifice it and adopt the Latin alphabet. (Ma-kedonski 1930: 168; my translation)
In his text, Makedonski approached the question of the writing tradition in a rather pragmatic way, without delving too much into its emotional implications, perhaps a little naively, not realizing how much the affective component of the alphabet played a fundamental role in the reception of this reform proposal.
In this regard, the position adopted by the writer Elin Pelin is also interesting: on the one hand, he evaluated the issue in purely technical terms and declared himself open to the possibilities of change; on the other, he referred to what could be considered the “sacred value” of a writing system in the consciousness of a nation. His contribution began precisely with a reminder of this fundamental aspect of writing, its function being not only technical but also symbolic:
The writing system of a people, with its signs and rules, is a tradition that has become sacred, transformed into moral law. And it cannot be so easily overthrown. (Pelin 1930: 178; my translation)
Immediately afterwards, however, he stressed the importance of the modern communication factor, expressing his wide-ranging international vision of the matter:
But today, when the world has become accessible and common to all, when one can travel the globe in a few days, when the radio simultaneously connects the four corners of the world, it will also be necessary to unify alphabetic characters. People are increasingly looking for innovative and simple means of communication to understand and comprehend each other. And in this desire, we should not be so surprised if traditions that are sacred but have a purely technical meaning collapse. (ibid.; my translation)
Curiously, Pelin’s position in favor of the Latin alphabet seems to echo the words used by the linguist Otto Jespersen, creator of the artificial language Novial, in 1928 and, as we shall see, a strong advocate of a universal Latinization campaign:
In these days of cheap travel, of commercial interchange between all parts of the world, of airplanes and broadcasting, of international science and of world-politics, it seems an urgent need for merchants, technical men, scientists, literary men, politicians, in fact for everybody, to have an easy means of getting into touch with foreigners and of learning more from them than is possible by visiting other countries as tongue-tied tourists [...] nowadays we have come to the point of needing an international language. (Jespersen 2010: 400 [1928])
In Pelin’s view, considered strictly as a technical, graphic system that functioned for communication purposes, the Cyrillic alphabet could easily be replaced by another due to historical contingencies. In a sense, this reflected precisely the most representative vision of the “pro-Latinizing” movements of the time, which associated this writing system with principles of modernization and technological advancement. Indeed, in the Soviet Union until the 1930s, attempts to introduce the Latin alphabet were driven by ideals of progress and modernity and by the conviction that it would simplify communication between the various peoples of the Union as well as their literacy practices. It is noteworthy that, in some cases, Soviet linguists also created new Latin-based scripts for the languages of peoples who were not part of the USSR but were ideologically linked to it, such as Mandarin. It was indeed believed that the Marxist revolution was going to triumph in China too, and Chinese characters would be subsequently abandoned, replaced by modern Latin-based literacy practices (Henze 1975: 393, Wellish 1978: 75-77).
Petko Stajnov, an influential intellectual and member of the Bulgarian National Assembly, openly Russophile (cf. Boneva 2001), considered quite rationally the prospect of alphabet reform in Bulgaria, pointing out that his country could not escape the influence of “great Russia,” which had “always and in spite of everything” been decisive for Bulgarians (Stajnov 1930: 175; my translation). However, he did not express the enthusiasm of the more “pro-Latinization” positions, and foresaw that script reform would require in any case a long period of time. Commenting on the technical question of writing the Bulgarian language in Latin letters, Stajnov remarked:
I have never attempted to write in the Latin alphabet, but I suppose it is not impossible for experts to arrange adequate letters or signs from Latin for all the sounds of our language, as has already been done for Romanian and Turkish, though the Slavonic character might be better suited for this purpose. (ibid.; my translation)
In those years, as we have seen, Yakovlev’s belief in the Latinization of the Russian language was itself very strong, and seemed destined to become a reality within a short time. In his vision, the Cyrillic alphabet represented an obstacle to the construction of socialism, both because of its association with the country’s Tsarist past and as a graphic boundary separating the peoples who were already using the Latin alphabet. In short, it was necessary to create a new writing system that would embody the alphabet of socialism:
Hence, in the context of the construction of socialism in the USSR, the existence of the Russian alphabet represents an absolute anachronism—a sort of graphic barrier dissociating the largest group of peoples in the Union from both the revolutionary East and the working masses of the proletariat in the West. (Yakovlev 1930: 35; my translation)
In Bulgaria, Stajnov pointed out that the adoption of the Latin alphabet by neighboring Turkey had already had significant consequences, as the Bulgarian Turks themselves “had to abandon the characters bequeathed to their language over the centuries” (Stajnov 1930: 175; my translation), a statement which seems to manifest a sort of regret at the loss of Arabic characters in relation to the Turkish language in Bulgaria. The fate of the Turkish alphabet reform in Bulgaria, however, as we shall soon see, followed a very peculiar course.
Stajnov also mentioned the case of Yugoslavia, which in those years made both alphabets equally obligatory: thus, Latin had prevailed even in Bosnia (Stajnov 1930: 175). We can note that if Soviet linguists often cited Atatürk’s successful reform as a positive argument for their proposed script change, in the Bulgarian case the proponents of Latinization did not base their argument on the “Turkish model”, since only the Russian one was considered relevant. Rather, this model was used by the opponents to the reform as an example of a different writing context, not comparable to the Bulgarian one.
Like Elin Pelin, Stajnov acknowledged the importance of cultural and more “sentimental” factors in connection with the Bulgarian Cyrillic alphabet, but only to note that, after the adoption of Latin by Russia, the question of the appropriateness of this alphabet reform would arise in the country “in reverse”:
[…] is it appropriate for Bulgaria to persist in remaining a Cyrillic oasis only because of its national originality, because of the tribute to Saints Cyril and Methodius, because of its outward loyalty through the alphabet to the orthodoxy of the motherland? (Stajnov 1930: 175; my translation)
Stajnov commented that, from a personal point of view, he would certainly feel sorry for the loss of the alphabet of his childhood and his ancestors. He conceded, however, that this was a purely personal and above all “emotional” matter, which could not prevail against the dictates of technology, the need for unification and the influence of the surrounding context on his country. For “reasons of rationality,” the same rationality that had led the Bulgarians eventually to “accept Arabic numerals instead of Slavic ones, to eliminate a number of letters, to modify the same signs, to adopt the Gregorian calendar” (ibid.; my translation), Bulgarian culture had to follow the universal course of technology and communication. The personal and emotional desire to remain faithful to the hitherto prevailing traditions had to be sacrificed for the collective good. As for the timing, Stajnov expressed his conviction that the alphabet reform would eventually prevail in the country, though perhaps not in his lifetime, if technology did not find “another way of writing and printing or a special shorthand that would save us from Cyrillic as well as from Latin” (ibid.; my translation)!
In this context, the printer Kadela expressed a similar opinion, giving voice to his displeasure at the demise of a writing tradition characteristic of his country and the Slavic world in general: “It is only a pity that with the introduction of the Latin script one of the peculiarities associated with Slavic culture and preserved for centuries will be lost” (Kadela 1930: 169; my translation). Undoubtedly, this question appeared to be a rather sensitive one and, far from being a mere technical controversy, it implied a series of considerations that were not always easy to deal with.
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