Vol. XXVIII, No. 4 WASHINGTON 



October, 1915 



B 



THE 



NATIONAL 



GEOGMAPEDG 



MAGAZINE 



• 



GREECE OF TODAY 



By George Higgins Moses 



Formerly United States Minister to Greece 



GREECE of today deems herself — 

 and is in truth — the heir to the 

 ages. Not only from her classic 

 past, but from every era of foreign dom- 

 ination, her incomparable spirit has taken 

 and assimilated some feature now dis- 

 tinguishable in her every-day life. Ro- 

 man, Venetian, and Moslem have thus 

 paid tribute to the brave people whom 

 they have overridden, but whom they 

 could not subdue. 



There are few parallels — indeed, at the 

 moment, I can recall but one — to the 

 striking racial phenomenon of Hellenic 

 continuity throughout the vicissitudes of 

 2,000 years. Modern research has pene- 

 trated the dark byways of medieval 

 Greek history, and we now know that the 

 Greeks, whatever their temporary fate, 

 have preserved unbroken the thread of 

 their national existence. 



The firmest bond which unites the 

 Greek of today with his illustrious fore- 

 bears of the golden age is the Greek lan- 

 guage, the essential elements of which 

 remain as they were in the days when 

 the tongue served as the medium of the 

 noblest poetry and the sublimest philoso- 

 phy which the race has yet produced. 

 This tongue traces its unbroken lineage 

 back through medieval and New Testa- 

 ment Greek to the classic speech of Plato 

 and of his contemporaries. 



A WAR OE words 



And yet, with all this continuity of 

 language, there exists now in Greece a 



linguistic condition of affairs around 

 which centers a controversy at once comic 

 or tragic ; for there are in Greece two 

 languages, or, rather, the one language in 

 two forms — one written by the news- 

 papers, spoken by the educated classes, 

 and used in parliamentary debates and in 

 public documents, including the Scrip- 

 tures, the circulation of which is regu- 

 lated by law ; and the other a vernacular 

 used by the masses of the people, con- 

 taining many words of foreign origin, 

 especially Turkish and Italian, arising 

 from those periods of foreign occupation, 

 with a much simplified grammar and 

 rarely reduced to writing, except for pri- 

 vate communications. The former is the 

 cultured tongue ; the latter the popular 

 idiom ; and between the two there rages 

 a merciless warfare, in which fanatical 

 students of the university have lost their 

 lives, ministers their portfolios, a Met- 

 ropolitan of Athens his miter, and the 

 sweet- faced queen-mother much of her 

 former popularity. 



The controversy is too intricate to be 

 briefly summarized, and, like most ques- 

 tions which divide the Levantine mind, 

 it is probably not to be settled wholly in 

 favor of either extreme party. But it has 

 its humorous aspects, as when, during 

 some language riots a few years ago, an 

 impassioned orator for the pure tongue 

 received the congratulations of his audi- 

 ence in the vulgar speech, and an enthusi- 

 ast for the cultured phrase, who stood 

 near me in a huge mass-meeting in Uni- 



