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.