Krifo scholio

In Greek history, a krifó scholió (Greek "κρυφό σκολειό" or "κρυφό σχολείο", lit. 'secret school') was a supposed underground school for teaching the Greek language and Christian doctrine, provided by the Greek Orthodox Church under Ottoman rule in Greece between the 15th and 19th centuries. Many historians agree that there is no evidence that such schools ever existed. Other historians accept that secret schools only existed during periods of intense islamisation, other see it as a possible "myth" and others believe that the Krifo Scholio was a reality. Professor of philology Alkes Angelou (1917-2001), in one of his last publications on the subject, finds that the krifó scholió persisted as a national myth.

School textbooks in Greece treated the krifó scholió as factual until the late 20th century, when it was finally removed, despite some political controversy, as a "national memory which had been, to some extent, fictitious", creating conflict with "the Church and ethnonationalism".

There is ample evidence that Greek language schools operated in many places of the Ottoman Empire, especially after mid-18th century. However, thera are indications that local Ottoman authorities in the periphery were unfavorable toward schools. For example, a 1820 article referring to the formidable school of Melies (Central Greece) describes it as "favorable to a retreat of the Muses [because] It is remote from the jealous eye of the Turkish governor, and still more secured from his encroachments by certain privileges and immunities, which have been granted to the town by the government." There were restrictions; in Ottoman Epirus in 1913, for example, the authorities required that books come from Ottoman Constantinople rather than from Athens in independent Greece, so some teachers gave political instruction in secret.

Nonetheless, it is sometimes said in Greece today that the Ottoman authorities prohibited education in the languages of non-Muslim subject peoples, obliging Greeks to organize small, secret schools in monasteries and churches. Supposed sites of such secret schools are today shown in many places in Greece, notably at the Philosophou Monastery in Dimitsana. These schools are often credited with having played a decisive role in keeping Greek language and literacy alive through the period of Turkish rule. An early claim of repressed education of Greeks is found in a speech of Konstantinos Oikonomou, in 1821. He says that schools in Ottoman Empire operated under the pretext of teaching religion and commerce, some of them were kept open through bribing influential Turks, and that the official school of Smyrna was persecuted because it taught mathematics and philosophy.

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