Literature for the Children of Greece

In ancient days, in this part of the world, one might say that children were rocked to sleep with tales from Homer. Later on, Homer became their Schoolbook, their history, their geography, in a way even their Bible. But it is not so today. How could it be? The world has changed, and above all the language has changed so much in these nearly three thousand years that, although most of the words of modern Greek are derived from the same roots and quite a number of them have come down unchanged, it takes a scholar to read a Homeric text and enjoy it with ease. So Homer is now taught in the last two classes of our gymnasium, our secondary school. In the lower classes children read myths from Homer, or even translations of pieces into modern Greek. Educational systems have changed, and although the West still loyally sticks to the ancient Greek sound mind/sound body principle, the school curriculum has had to be altered to meet the requirements of our time. In the following paragraphs, I shall try to sketch the beginnings and progress of modern Greek literature for children.

When we speak of modern Greece, we Greeks have in mind a date—1821—when the Greek War of Independence against the Turks began. The Turkish yoke had lasted for nearly 400 years. It was cruel, devastating. The War was long, full of reverses, thoroughly depleting. It was undertaken by an exhausted and impoverished people, and when it ended and the Greeks won their independence, they were still more exhausted and impoverished. Schools had been closed down by the Turks since their occupation of the country following the fall of Constantinople. In large centers of population some schools reopened and managed to function through thick and thin, but in the more distant districts, in the isolated corners of Greece, schools were non-existent for years and years, so that a very great percentage of the population was doomed to illiteracy. Yet the light had not gone out completely. Tradition never dies, and this land has a long tradition and history, and what a history! So the fire kept burning secretly. At first it was a mere flicker here and there, but soon some enlighted individuals began to think what should be done to stir up the flicker to a flame: to educate the young, to raise the morale of the people, to prepare for liberation. In the beginning a village priest, here and there, secretly gathered the children of his community in the church or in his home and taught them how to read and write. To avoid attracting the attention of the Turkish gendarmes, the teaching was carried out after nightfall. A song came down to us from those times, sung by the children as they went to school. It runs like this, in a rough translation:

Bright moon,Light me on my wayAs I walk to schoolTo learn to read and writeAll God's good thingsSewing and embroideryAnd what God wills.

The Schoolbook was the book of Psalms, from which the children memorised their prayers. Often the teacher-priest was a man of only rudimentary education, but sometimes he was a monk who had studied at a monastery school at the University level. The monks who left their monasteries and went among the people teaching and preaching believed that this was a better way of serving their God. Schools were for centuries thus connected with the Greek Orthodox Church, and the people's faith in Christian belief was a great support to them in their hard times.

For hundreds of years education in Greece was a matter of a handful of people who were earnestly interested in educating the nation. There was no ministry of education, no support whatever from the Turkish authorities. On the contrary, it was to their interest that the Greek people remained illiterate. As for books, the Greeks did what they could with what they could find. Myths of Aesop or other Greek myths, some lives of the saints, or a popular biography of...