Antonis Danos Nikolaos Gyzis's The Secret School and an Ongoing National Discourse Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 1, no. 2 (Autumn 2002) Citation: Antonis Danos, “Nikolaos Gyzis's The Secret School and an Ongoing National Discourse,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 1, no. 2 (Autumn 2002), http://www.19thc- artworldwide.org/autumn02/258-nikolaos-gyziss-the-secret-school-and-an-ongoing-national- discourse. Published by: Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art Notes: This PDF is provided for reference purposes only and may not contain all the functionality or features of the original, online publication. ©2002 Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide Danos: Nikolaos Gyzis‘s The Secret School and an Ongoing National Discourse Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 1, no. 2 (Autumn 2002) Nikolaos Gyzis's The Secret School and an Ongoing National Discourse by Antonis Danos The rediscovery of an ethnic past furnishes vital memories, values, symbols, and myths, without which nationalism would be powerless. But those myths, symbols, values and memories have popular resonance because they are founded on living traditions of the people . [and they invoke] presumed kinship and residence ties to underpin the authenticity of the unique cultural values of the community.[1] [T]he paradigmatic figure of the national community is the artist. [G]reat artists are they who create out of the collective experience of the people, preserved in historical legends, and dramatize their lessons for the present.[2] Nationalist narratives traditionally have owed much of their appeal and longevity to myths that find resonance in—and reinforce—a people's sense of ethnic or national collectivity. One of the more enduring myths of Greek national imagining is that of the Secret School (Krypho Scholio). It concerns the alleged suppression (and, in some cases, total prohibition) of education, by the Ottomans, among their subject peoples. According to the Secret School narrative, because of this suppression (especially during the first two centuries of Ottoman rule in Greece, the mid-fifteenth to the early seventeenth), Greeks had secretly organized small, underground schools for the education of their children. These schools were said to have convened in churches or monasteries, usually at night, and usually the teachers were priests. Despite a lack of any serious historiographical support for the existence of such schools, this myth has long been part of the populist historical narrative and is sufficiently acknowledged in official discourse to warrant its incorporation into primary school textbooks. In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the Secret School myth became fully consolidated by the incorporation into the narrative of an existing popular nursery rhyme, by its visualization by Nikolaos Gyzis (1842–1901) in his painting The Secret School, 1885–86 (Emfietzoglou Collection, Athens) and by its commemoration in Ioannis Polemis's homonymous poem of 1900, which was inspired by Gyzis's picture. Generations of schoolchildren in the twentieth century were immersed in the Secret School myth via their familiarity with the nursery song, the painting, and the poem, all of which were—and continue to be—part of school celebrations and paraphernalia on national anniversaries. The myth's wide appeal was reconfirmed in recent years by the commotion surrounding the auction of Gyzis's picture, where it set a price record for a modern Greek artwork, and by the debates (mostly in the press) concerning Alkis Angelou's book The Secret School,[3] which set out to expose the lack of historical (or "scientific") substance in the myth's narrative. While the intertwining over the years of historical, literary, and artistic threads into the fabric of this narrative makes this myth a fascinating manifestation of national imagining—and Gyzis's painting occupies a central place in this process—the myth has also become vulnerable to more unorthodox cases of appropriation. As Angelou points out, no scholar has come across any source material from the Ottoman years that refers to the existence of secret schools.[4] In fact, the first such references 57 Danos: Nikolaos Gyzis‘s The Secret School and an Ongoing National Discourse Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 1, no. 2 (Autumn 2002) emerge after the breakout of the Greek Revolution in 1821. In his work Leucothea (1825), the German scholar Carl Iken mentions secret schools in Ottoman Greece based on information provided to him by the Greek scholar Stephanos Kanellos, a member of the Enlightenment circle of Adamantios Koraes.[5] The circle was made up of Greek scholars who were living in various diaspora centers during Greece's Ottoman occupation. At about the second half of the eighteenth century, they engaged in a process of reinventing the Greek people's past in order to determine their future. The circle's main concern was the liberation of Greece from Ottoman rule. Most of its members envisaged a centralized nation- state oriented both politically and culturally to the West. For Greek scholars who regarded Europe as the modern-day inheritor of Greek classical culture, such an orientation amounted to a re-establishment of ties with the nation's ancient heritage. These Enlightenment scholars were anxious to prove to "civilized" Europe that modern Greeks deserved to be free. Kanellos's contribution to Iken's text—which, as Angelou asserts, we cannot treat as a starting point for the invention of the myth, since it is a foreign source that would have been largely ignored in Greece[6]—can be seen as indicative of such anxieties by Greek scholars at the time. They argued, essentially, that even during the years of "slavery" under the Turks Greeks had longed for education and cultural "regeneration." Moreover, Iken's adoption of the information given to him points to European expectations of contemporary Greeks that the latter sought to fulfill. The connection between education and cultural regeneration and political freedom was at the core of Greek Enlightenment ideology. This ideology was carried over by the last Enlightenment scholars into the newly established Greek state, founded in 1828, and especially into the University of Athens, established in 1837. In their inaugural speeches and other panegyrics, many of the professors alluded both to the Greeks' "natural inclination" for education and the Turks' "suspicion," even "persecution," of its pursuit.[7] By the 1860s, such notions were expressed in even more sensationalist terms and were related more specifically to the Secret School construct: "Under the pitiless whip of the blood-thirsty tyrant, the humble priest and the wretched teacher, terrified but determined and undaunted, gather in invisible shelters the tender children in order to introduce them, secretly, to the teachings of Greek Orthodoxy and science," and out of these schools came the martyrs who gave their lives for their faith and country.[8] Another element that added to the myth's popularity was the incorporation into its narrative of a children's song, the melody of which was based on a nursery rhyme.[9] According to Angelou, the song's lyrics went through extensive alterations[10] and of its five original lines only the first two are unchanged: My little bright moon shine on my footsteps so that I can go to school to learn to read and write to learn God's teachings.[11] The rhyme had been included, in various forms, in Greek folk song collections by European scholars in the nineteenth century—Claude Fauriel (1824), Daniel Sanders (1844), Arnold 58 Danos: Nikolaos Gyzis‘s The Secret School and an Ongoing National Discourse Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 1, no. 2 (Autumn 2002) Passow (1860)[12]—but neither they nor the Greek Vlasios Skordelis, who published the song in a Greek journal in 1860, made any connection between the song and the Secret School myth.[13] That changed, however, in the 1870s and the association was repeated with increasing frequency.[14] As Angelou shows, the Secret School narrative was perpetuated outside scientific historical scholarship, for there is a conspicuous absence, among Greek and non-Greek scholars alike, of any published mention of it.[15] One exception (especially glaring because it did not appear in any of the author's earlier writings) is in a book by G. Chassiotis, published in French in 1881, concerning public education in Greece after the fall of Constantinople.[16] The fact that the book was intended for European readers (it was published in Paris), toward whom a certain image of the Greeks had to be projected, reinforces the argument that the Secret School myth was intended as much for external as for internal consumption. Whereas most historians conveyed their rejection of the Secret School construct with silence, some actively engaged in its repudiation. One of the first to do so was Dimitrios Kambouroglou, who in his three-volume History of Athens (1889) exposed the absence of any historical evidence for the existence of secret schools, and he mocked the incorporation of the children's song into the myth.[17] His claims, however, failed to avert acceptance of the myth as historical reality.[18] By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Secret School construct had acquired the aura of a sacred national symbol, and efforts at its repudiation by scholars such as Manuel Gedeon and Yannis Vlachoyannis in the 1930s and 1940s did not diminish its prestige.[19] Much of the myth's endurance is owed to its visualization by Nikolaos Gyzis in the 1880s. Nikolaos Gyzis was born on the Aegean island of Tinos and was sent for his education to Athens in 1850. He graduated from the School of Fine Arts in 1864 and a year later, after receiving a scholarship, he left for Munich to attend the Royal Academy of Arts. He was offered a permanent teaching post at the Academy in 1888.