The Gospel riots (Greek: Ευαγγελικά, Evangelika), which took place on the streets of Athens in November 1901, were primarily a protest against the publication in the newspaper Akropolis of a translation into modern spoken Greek of the Gospel of Matthew, although other motives also played a part. The disorder reached a climax on 8 November, "Black Thursday", when eight demonstrators were killed.
In the aftermath of the violence, the Greek Orthodox Church reacted by banning any translation of the Bible into any form of modern demotic Greek, and by forbidding the employment of demoticist teachers, not just in Greece but anywhere in the Ottoman Empire.
The riots marked a turning-point in the history of the Greek language question, and the beginning of a long period of bitter antagonism between the Orthodox Church and the demoticist movement.
Linguistic background: the rise of demoticism
By 1901, the long debate known as the Greek language question had been underway for 135 years. Initial hopes that Ancient Greek itself could be revived as the language of the newly liberated Greek nation had proved illusory; modern spoken or "demotic" Greek had evolved far from its ancient roots, and the two languages were now mutually incomprehensible.
As a compromise, a grammatically simplified version of Ancient Greek known as katharevousa glossa ("language that tends towards purity") had been adopted as the written language of the new state in 1830. This meant that the spoken and written languages were now intentionally different. It was hoped that written katharevousa would provide a model for imitation, and that spoken Greek would naturally "purify" itself by becoming more like this written form, and therefore more like Ancient Greek, within a matter of decades. To provide additional motivation, the current spoken or demotic Greek was widely condemned as "base" and "vulgar", the damaged product of centuries of linguistic corruption by subjection to Ottoman "Oriental despotism".
After 50 years, spoken demotic still showed no sign of becoming "purified" into something more like Ancient Greek. On the other hand, katharevousa was proving unsatisfactory in use as a general-purpose written language. Scholars could not agree on its grammatical rules; and as a purely written language with no native speakers, it could not evolve a natural grammar of its own. Its Ancient Greek vocabulary could not be used to write about the objects and events of ordinary life without sounding stilted and unnatural.
The problem was compounded by the educational system. Until 1881 only Ancient Greek—not even katharevousa—was taught in Greek primary schools, continuing the tradition of the Greek Orthodox Church, which had exercised an effective monopoly over education for centuries. (The church had always taught the ancient koine Greek of the gospels and the Divine Liturgy.) Children thus had to learn to read and write in a language they did not speak, or even hear outside church. This had been acceptable in previous centuries, when the schools had concentrated on training future priests; but it could not provide universal popular literacy.
By 1880, many were beginning to feel that katharevousa had outlived its usefulness. Kostis Palamas led the New Athenian School in a renaissance of demotic poetry; Roïdis pinpointed the deficiencies of katharevousa, and coined the word diglossia to describe the unhealthy split between the spoken and written languages; and finally, in 1888, Ioannis Psycharis published My Journey, which transformed the language debate.
Psycharis proposed the immediate abandonment of katharevousa and the adoption of demotic for all written purposes. He did not reject the relationship with Ancient Greek; on the contrary, as an evolutionary linguist, he argued that spoken demotic really was Ancient Greek, merely two thousand years further along in its evolutionary history. As a Neogrammarian, he believed that the essence of language was passed on by speech rather than writing, and he regarded katharevousa as an artificial construct rather than a true language.
Many agreed with him up to this point. But Psycharis went further: if demotic were to be used as the written language of a modern state, it would need a larger technical vocabulary. Educated everyday speech in the 1880s simply borrowed such terms from written katharevousa (for example: the word ἐξέλιξις, "evolution", was altered to ἐξέλιξη to conform to the morphology of spoken demotic).
Psycharis rejected all such borrowings. Instead, he coined the word ξετυλιξιά, which he claimed was the word spoken Greek would have evolved for the concept of evolution if it had been free of the corrupting influence of katharevousa. He created many such words on the same principle; his declared aim was to set up a revitalized, scientifically derived demotic as a new written standard based entirely on the spoken language, isolated from katharevousa and independent of it.
Some found the new coinages ugly and unnatural: "Psycharis' versions sounded like mispronunciations of learned words by uneducated people, who would be unlikely to be familiar with many of these words in the first place." Others were inspired by Psycharis' vision and became enthusiastic supporters of his version of demotic. Notable among these was Alexandros Pallis, whose translation was to play a leading part in the events surrounding the Gospel Riots.
Psycharis is widely credited with turning demoticism from an idea into a movement, which steadily gained strength during the 1890s. Although he met some opposition, it was at first mainly good-humoured, constructive, and centred on linguistic and cultural issues.
By 1896, the situation might be summarized as follows: Ancient Greek was established firmly in the Church, in secondary schools, and also in primary schools (with some katharevousa there since 1881). Katharevousa was still used for every kind of administration and for non-fiction literature, but in prose fiction, it was just beginning to give way to demotic. In poetry, demotic had taken the lead.
The supporters of katharevousa were on the defensive, but the demoticist movement was split between the "extreme" demoticists spearheaded by Psycharis and Pallis, and the "moderate" demoticists who were less doctrinaire, and much more tolerant of borrowing from katharevousa (these moderates would finally win the language debate, 80 years later).
Religious background: previous gospel translations
The Eastern Orthodox Church had never had theological objections, in principle, to translation of the Ancient Koine Greek gospels into a more modern form of Greek closer to the spoken language. "The first translation appeared in the 11th century and until the beginning of the 19th century as many as twenty-five had been published. Some of these translations were officially solicited by the Patriarchate at Constantinople, while others were the work of prominent theologians and monks. The main characteristic of these translations, solicited or not, was that those who undertook them were members of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Hence, they did not pose a direct threat to the authority of the church but merely a challenge, aiming at making it more open-minded and receptive to the changing times."