Gospel Riots

The Gospel riots (Greek: Ευαγγελικά, Evangelika) took place on the streets of Athens in November 1901. They were primarily a protest against the publication in the newspaper Akropolis of a translation into modern spoken Greek of the gospel of St 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.

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 different. This was quite intentional; 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".

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