After so many long struggles, systematic study, experience and application
in all genres, a twenty-year prevalence of demotic Greek in literature, affirmation
of the power of the people using, experiencing and using it -it is surprising
that professors of the standing of N. Politis resurface
with trivial arguments, old views, judgements based on individual tastes, and
express doctrinaire views, putting under doubt the faith in linguistic renaissance, the most important
intellectual route that the Nation has walked in recent years, finding there anew
its lost and misled genuine and rich soul. The objective is evident. To raise obstacles to the evolution of such
a firm reform, which has been the common desire of every Greek truly educated and
intellectually free.
The issue that has been approached in various ways in the past, that turned into fanatics the teachers
of another era, that incensed blind people against imaginary hazards, that drew the attention
of all educated people, is time to cease being still an "issue". People has been sufficiently
tortured by the mandarins, by the narrow-mindedness of certain among them, by the vested interests of others,
people was left behind in education, sank in illiteracy, and underwent the effects of a nightmare, that
has been eating up his school years. The change matured and came about by itself. Even if
literature had held the supreme place in it, this is no sheer coincidence, but being closer to the feelings
of the people, she was the first to listen to his sacred secret desire, which has been trumpeted with no fear,
by the likes of Solomos and Psycharis, armed with Poetry and Science. The reform is an actuality.
It will proceed with courage because she is led by the law of Necessity.
This protest of ours signed by the younger generation who feel deep inside them the significance of the
lingustic Renaissance is raised against all those who believe that the deeply buried carcass of
katharevousa may revive, who doubt the voice of life and truth, who contemplate the present victory
of demotic Greek with hesitation, today that the peoples, trampling all kind of slavery, crush all shackles
with which medieval superstitions, scholastic views and conservative blindness, have chained the life, the
soul and the spirit.
We have an invincible faith and we trumpet it that demotic Greek has all the biological components
of a cultured language and only through this could the intellectual life of Greece enjoy
new springs.
Athens, 25 February 1919.
Copied from P. Moullas (intr.-ed.), I palaioteri pezografia mas, v. 1, p. 380.
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