Gospel riots

The Gospel riots (Greek: Ευαγγελικά, Evangelika), which took place on the streets of Athens in November 1901, were primarily a protest against the publication in the newspaper Akropolis of a translation into modern spoken Greek of the Gospel of Matthew, although other motives also played a part. The disorder reached a climax on 8 November, "Black Thursday", when eight demonstrators were killed.^[a][1]

In the aftermath of the violence the Greek Orthodox Church reacted by banning any translation of the Bible into any form of modern demotic Greek, and by forbidding the employment of demoticist teachers, not just in Greece but anywhere in the Ottoman Empire.

The riots marked a turning-point in the history of the Greek language question, and the beginning of a long period of bitter antagonism between the Orthodox Church and the demoticist movement.^{[2]: 244–52}

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