Antonio Baldacci, Italian ethnographer, political scientist, geographer, and botanist: "The writing of Albanian was explicitly prohibited by the Patriarchate of Constantinople, under threat of excommunication."
THE ALBANIANS
There is an air almost European about the town of Koritza.
The energy and virility of the Albanian character seem somehow to have found a half- expression. Yet a Greek Bishop and a Turkish Pasha, aliens both of them, still
claim the allegiance of the town, though confronted by a spirit of the soil which both dread and both persecute — a spirit that is busily knitting a new people
together, in spite of all their efforts. If the secret thought in the august hearts of these twoofficials could be bared to the world, it would deserve to rankamong the rarest curiosities of officialdom. They have onemaster passion, the Bishop and the Pasha, and when they have finished praying for each other's destruction in their daily secret devotions, i suspect that a fervent little clause in Greek and in Turkish is addressed in much the same phraseology to Allah and the Trinity. And that is a prayer for the destruction of a spelling-book. They look upon that spelling-book much as Zeus regarded the torches of Prometheus...
...I had just been paying a formal call on the Bishop, who had explained to me how, ever since he had been Secretary to the Ecumenical Patriarch, his hard-won leisure had been spent in ceaseless efforts to promote a union between the Anglican and the Greek Church. In business hours he had sterner work. He occupied himself in excommunicating the parents of all the children who dared to attend the Protestant school where that spelling-book is harboured. It seemed an odd way of promoting the union of Protestantism and Orthodoxy. As for the Pasha, he had lately sent the chief of police to hunt for seditious books, and only a peremptory telegram from one of the consulates in Monastir had availed to save the alphabet.
The history of that spelling-book is the record of the one hopeful movement which gives a promise of enlightenment to the Albania of the future.
There were no doubt schools in such centres as Jannina, Berat, Koritza, and Elbasan, but i they belonged to the Orthodox Church, and their whole ( instruction was in Greek). They taught the young Albanian that he was a Greek, that he must speak Greek, and that his mother-tongue was only a nursery dialect for children, or a barbarous patois for " Turks." As for the Muslims, school hardly entered into their notions. The Turkish conceptionof a school was a place where little boys squatted upon the ground, and recited the Koran by heart...
...The first Albanian book that was ever printed was an " Imitatio Christi," published in Venice in 1626. A Catholic Bishop of Uskub, by name Bogdanes, did much for the language. He used the Latin alphabet, and a few copies of his works are still extant. He had a more enterprising successor towards the end of the eighteenth century, an Orthodox teacher named Theodore, who lived in Elbasan. He was the first pioneer to attempt a serious study of the language, and his "Lexicon Tetraglosson " (Latin, Greek, Vlach, Albanian) displays a real originality, since it claims for Albanian a place among the languages of Europe.
Clearly Theodore was a Pioneer born out of due time. It was a dangerous thing in those days to play with letters in Albania. Some fifty years later another Southern Albanian, Naum Veqilharxhi , took up Theodore's task, and worked out mother alphabet. It made some progress in the districts around Koritza, and a few little booklets were printed in it. But by this time the jealousies of the Greek clergy were aroused, and it is generally believed among albanian patriots that Naoum, who was so reckless as to mitrust himself during an illness to the Greek hospital at Constantinople, was poisoned by order of the Patriarch. I repeat the story because it is interesting to note that the efforts of the Albanians to throw the ignorance of the centuries had already roused the hostility of the Orthodox Church. As yet the movement was in its infancy, and could be checked by the untimely deaths of its leaders.
...Meanwhile the Catholic clergy in the North were by no means idle. The Jesuits issued a number of books, mostly, however, legends of the Saints, which can have had no particular educative value. A religious periodical was also published by them in Scutari. The happiest event for the Albanian language was the translation of the Bible by Constantine Christophorides (whose intellect has been quickened by an intimate association with the scholarly traveller. Von Hahn), under the auspices of the British and Foreign Bible Society.
It was issued at first in two alphabets, more or less modified to suit the peculiar phonetics of the Albanian language in Greek characters for the South, in Latin for the North. These early editions, however, found small favour, but between the years 1877-9 a Committee of Albanian patriots, most of them moslems, sat in Constantinople and elaborated yet another alphabet, mainly Latin, with an admixture of Greek characters. This was at length adopted by the Bible Society, and their Albanian colporteurs were set to work to sell it. They are to this day persecuted alike by the Greek Church and by the Turks. Every journey they undertake is an adventure. Their families are boycotted and excommunicated by the Orthodox priesthood they themselves are frequently imprisoned by the Turks. The work of the Constantinople Commission soon attracted the notice of the Turkish Government, and it had perforce to remove itself to a free centre. It settled in Bucharest and established a printing press of its own, from which about fifty books have been issued, including a Grammar, a Life of Skanderbeg, a popular history of Albania, and a number of translations. Albanian periodicals are issued in Bucharest, in Sofia, in Rome, and in London, but comparatively few copies find their way into Turkey...
...To keep Albania savage and ignorant is a fundamental principle of Abdul Hamid's statescraft. Macedonia is covered with schools which disseminate the views of every conceivable racial propaganda. There are Greek schools to Hellenise Vlachs and Slavs and Albanians. There are Bulgarian schools which maintain the schism within the Orthodox Church. There are Servian schools to split the Slav element. There are Roumanian schools to detach the Vlachs from the Hellenic interest. On all of these the Porte smiles with an indifferent and capricious favour. The more schools there are and the more propagandas, the less fear is there of a coalition among the Christians against he Turkish yoke. For all of these there is a contemptuous tolerance. They are part of the hereditary Ottoman tradition of dividing to conquer. But Albanian schools fall under a very different category. In them the Turks have seen a force making not for discord, but for unity. The Albanians, divided in religion, have only their language in common, and in the cult of that language lies the hope of the reunion of Moslem and Christian. The Albanian movement, nationalist like all the others, differed from them in seeking its rallying-point not in a religious but in a secular propaganda...
...Indeed, the surprising thing is that Albanian schools ever came to be established at all. In 1884, however, the Albanian Society, which was busied in publishing its booklets and periodicals in Bucharest, contrived to open a secondary school for boys in Koritza. It had on an average about sixty pupils, who came from both Moslem and Christian families, while the teachers belonged to the Orthodox rite. Its success among the Christians, however, was limited, because from the first it was subjected to the systematic persecution of the Greek clergy. The reading of anathemas against it soon became a regular part of the ritual in the Greek cathedral. Its teachers were steadily boycotted. But even these methods proved ineffective, and ultimately the Greeks found it necessary to denounce the two principal Albanian teachers as traitors who were conspiring against the Sultan. Their efforts went unheeded for some years, since the war of 1897 had left the whole Greek race under a cloud. But in 1902 the teachers, two brothers named Naoum and Leonidas Natcha, were arrested, and still languish untried in prison. The school, as i saw it, is a wrecked and dismantled shell, its garden overgrown with weeds, and its class-rooms littered with the stones which the apostles of Hellenism and culture cast through its broken windows as they go arrogantly by. Another interesting experiment still survives in a maimed form. In 1889 an Albanian Protestant School for girls and young boys was started under the auspices of the American Mission by Mr. Gerassimo Kyrias, an able and devoted man who did much in a short life for his language and the cause. Like so many of the pioneers of the movement, he came to an untimely end. He was captured by brigands, and dragged about by them for the best part of a year, while his friends collected an exorbitant ransom. The exposure, the privation, and the wanton cruelty to which he was subjected during this experience practically killed him, and he died soon after his release. The school is carried on by his sister, a graduate of Robert College. For four years it thrived and was much patronised by the Moslem gentry of Koritza. But its success in due course aroused the suspicions of the authorities. It would never do to allow the next generation of the Mohamedan aristocracy to be brought up by mothers who had imbibed the idea of patriotism with a knowledge of their own tongue. It was given out that the father of any Mohamedan child attending the school would be sent immediately, and without trial, into lifelong exile.
Too many had gone that road before now a hapless poet whosewhole crime was to have published a version of the legend of Genevieve in the proscribed Albanian language, and again a generous and tolerant hey who had assisted the Koritza schools. The threat proved effective, and only the Christian scholars remained. With them the Greek clergy knew how to deal. There were the usual anathemas, excommunications, and boycotts, and in 1904 when I visited Koritza, Miss Kyrias found her pupils reduced to about twenty boarders, some of them Protestants, and most of them members of families whose homes lie beyond the immediate influence of the Bishop of Koritza. Her teaching is carried on as though it were a furtive and shameful practice, and her school, centre of high influences, model of order and sweetness and goodwill, would be more readily tolerated if it were a nest of vice and crime. At any moment the chief of police may come clanking into the courtyard, and more than once the brave woman who works there alone and unprotected has stood in her doorway and dared him to execute his threat of confiscating her books.
There are also the Catholic schools in the North, conducted by the Jesuits in Scutari, and one or two other of the larger Gheg centres. The Catholic clergy has done much for the Albanian language, but it conducts its schools on a definitely religious basis, which deprives them of any influence upon the Mohamedans, who form, after all, two- thirds of the population. They owe their immunity to the fact that they are under Austrian protection.
The same organisation which founded the Albanian boys' school in Koritza, opened schools at Pogradetz and in the Colonia district, but these also were closed mainly through the jealousy of the Greeks...
...Under the joint persecution of the Church and the State, the cult of the Albanian language has deepened and broadened into a patriotic movement at once nationalist and democratic....
Source:
Macedonia; its races and their future ([1906])
Author:
Brailsford, Henry Noel, 1873-1958
https://archive.org/details/macedoniaitsrace00braiuoft
"Edhe Krishti ne na thënte
Unë jam grek, eni pas meje,
Do t'i themi pa mblidh mente,
Se shqiptari s'vjen pas teje..."
Petro Nini Luarasi
Petro Nini Luarasi (born 22 April 1864 in
Luaras,
Kolonjë,
Albania, then
Ottoman Empire, and died on 17 August 1911 in
Ersekë,
Kolonjë, Albania, then Ottoman Empire) was an
Albanian rilindas activist,
Christian orthodox priest, teacher and journalist. His father, Nini Petro Kostallari, had also been active in the
Albanian National Revival as a publicist and teacher.
Between 1887-1893 Luarasi opened in
Ersekë and in some villages of the Kolonjë District Albanian language schools. Luarasi's founding and promotion of Albanian schools in the Kolonjë area brought him into conflict with Philaretos, the Greek archbishop of
Kastoria.
[3] In 1892 a circular letter was sent to the Kolonjë Orthodox Albanian population to dissuade ties between them and Luarasi with Philaretos referring to him as a "damned renegade" spreading "
free masonry and
Protestantism", while condemning his work with Albanian schooling and stating that the
Albanian language "did not exist".
[3]
For his patriotic deeds, teaching of the Albanian language and social activism he was persecuted both by the
Young Turks and the
Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople. He died poisoned by them on 17 August 1911.
[6][7][9][10]
"....I mallkuari dhe i shkishëruari Petro Luarasi , në bashkëpunim me propagandën protestante e masone, ka shkuar në fshatra të ndryshme të rrethit të Kolonjës, duke u premtuar emërimin e mësuesve shqiptarë për mësimin e shqipes, një gjuhë e cila nuk ekziston...Ata përhapin Dhiatën e Re, emisarë dhe libra të tjerë që janë kundër fesë sonë të shenjtë dhe që nëna e jonë, Kisha e madhe e Krishtit, ka kohë që i ka shkishëruar dhe djegur në turrën e druve... Shpallim se kushdo që ndikohet nga i mallkuari Petro Luarasi dhe shokët e tij, ose pranon mësues shqiptarë, do të shkishërohet nga i madhi Zot, do të marrë mallkimin e etërve të kishës, do ta zerë lebra e Gehazit dhe trupi i tij do të mbetet i patretur dhe do të përdhoset pas vdekjes..."
Filareti, kryepeshkopi grek i Kosturit më 20 shtator 1892
Google translation:
"... The cursed and excommunicated Petro Luarasi, in conjunction with Protestant propaganda and freemasons, has gone to various villages of the Colonia district, promising the appointment of Albanian teachers for learning Albanian, a language that does not exist ... They spread the New Testament, emissaries, and other books that are against our holy religion, and that our mother, the great Church of Christ, has long since excommunicated and burned on the wood poles ... We declare that anyone affected by the damned Petro Luarasi and his companions, or accepting Albanian teachers, will be excommunicated by the Great Lord, will take the curse of the church fathers, will garnish Gehazi's leprosy, and his body will remain undefiled and will be defiled after death ... "
Philaretos, the Greek archbishop of Kastoria on September 20, 1892
No other language or education in Europe has experienced such a martyrization: a five-century condemnation. Shortly, one terrifying statistic taken from “The History of Albanians”, of the French Serge Metais, published in 2006 in Paris, would be sufficient. The picture of the education is unbelievable. In 1887, in Albania there were three thousand schools. One thousand and two hundred of those were Turk public schools, equally as much Greek private schools, three hundred Bulgarian, Serbian and Vlach ones, and only one Albanian school, with Pandeli Sotiri as its headmaster!
So, nearly every language was allowed to be taught in “the tolerant empire”, except one: the Albanian language! And the story doesn’t end here. Four years later, Pandeli Sotiri is killed, the Albanian school is closed! This is the truth, which has not been clearly exposed to the Albanian people yet.
Ismail Kadare