The short answer: The Arvanites are the descendants of Albanian-speakers who settled the countryside around Athens and across southern Greece six centuries ago. They became Orthodox Greeks, they fought to found the modern Greek state, and their language — Arvanitika, a form of Albanian — was worn down to near-extinction inside about a hundred years. Their story is part of where Albanians actually come from, and it carries no claim on anyone’s borders. It is about how a language disappears, and how quickly.
Picture the scene. A new schoolteacher takes her post in a village near Athens, opens her mouth to begin the lesson, and finds that not one of her pupils can follow a word of Greek.
This happened in 1901, in a village the Albanian press would later identify as Shalësi, within a day’s walk of the Greek capital. The children spoke Albanian. So did their parents. The state had sent a teacher who spoke only Greek, and — according to a report that ran in an American newspaper that August — an interpreter had to be found before lessons could begin.
Seventy years after Greek independence, in the shadow of the city the whole modern nation was named for, a Greek teacher needed a translator to talk to Greek schoolchildren.
An unlikely witness
The report ran in The Journal Junior, the weekly children’s supplement of the Minneapolis Journal, on August 31, 1901. It survives in the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America archive, digitized with the Minnesota Historical Society, on page 8 of that day’s supplement — a short news item noting that in a village near Athens the pupils spoke Albanian and Greek was not understood. Anyone can pull the scan and read the exact wording; the record number is sn83045366, 1901-08-31, sequence 36.
Yes, it appeared in a children’s paper. That is not a weakness in the story — it is the story. The language situation around Athens was so ordinary in 1901 that it ran as a curiosity for schoolkids in Minnesota. Nobody was hiding it. American children could read about Albanian-speaking Attica over breakfast. Within two generations, most people in Athens itself would have no idea it had ever existed.
Who those villagers were
The people in that classroom were Arvanites — descendants of Albanian-speakers who moved south into what is now Greece in the 1300s and 1400s, invited by Byzantine, Catalan, and Venetian rulers to resettle land emptied by plague and war. They settled Attica, Boeotia, the Argolid, southern Euboea, and the islands of Hydra, Spetses, and Salamis. For roughly six centuries their language — Arvanitika, a Tosk Albanian dialect — was the everyday speech of the countryside around Athens.
Not the margins of the countryside. The middle of it. Menidi, now absorbed into the Athens urban area, was an Arvanite village. So was Spata — whose name likely traces to Gjin Bua Shpata, a 14th-century Albanian ruler — and which is now the site of Athens International Airport. Millions of travelers land on Arvanite ground every summer without a sign telling them so.
Here is the part that unsettles every nationalist telling, on both sides. The Arvanites were not a hidden Albania inside Greece, and they did not think of themselves as Albania’s lost children. They were Orthodox Christians, and when the revolution came in 1821 they fought for it — out of all proportion to their numbers. The admiral Andreas Miaoulis, who led the revolutionary fleet, came from Arvanite Hydra. The Kountouriotis family, who helped pay for the war, were Arvanites — Georgios Kountouriotis, who later led the revolutionary government, reportedly spoke Greek only with difficulty and conducted much of his correspondence in the Albanian dialect of Hydra. (Laskarina Bouboulina, the woman with her own warship, came from the same Hydra–Spetses world, though her specific descent is debated among historians.) The men and women who won Greece its state were, a striking number of them, people who prayed in Greek and spoke Albanian at home. (That inheritance is worth its own telling — see the Albanian-speakers who helped found modern Greece.)
So when Athens became the capital in 1834 — a town of a few thousand ringed by Arvanitika-speaking villages — nobody treated it as a problem. It was simply what Attica sounded like.
How a language dies an hour from the Acropolis
No massacre did this. No deportation, no burned villages, no law that ever used the word Arvanitika. What happened instead was quieter, and it worked.
Schools came first, and the 1901 report catches the mechanism mid-stride. Compulsory education arrived in Greek only. Every child who passed through that classroom came out literate in Greek and unlettered in the language spoken at home — because Arvanitika had no written form, no newspapers, no schoolbooks, no liturgy of its own. A purely spoken language has no institution to defend it. The church pulled the same direction: in the Balkans of that era, Orthodox meant Greek long before a census-taker arrived.
Then the state stopped being subtle. Under the Metaxas dictatorship of the late 1930s, minority languages were actively discouraged and pushed out of public life. The language retreated into the house in those years and mostly stayed there.
After 1945 the arithmetic got worse. Albania was now a hostile communist state on the border, and sounding Albanian in Greece turned from rustic to suspect. Many Arvanite communities responded the way pressured minorities often do — they insisted, loudly, that they were the oldest and purest Greeks of all. And parents made a deliberate choice, documented over and over by linguists: speak only Greek to the children, so they carry no accent and no stigma. The state did not have to finish the job. The stigma finished it for free.
The last step was the dullest: counting. Greece’s 1951 census recorded a little under 23,000 Albanian-speakers — a figure fieldworkers considered a serious undercount even then. It was also the last Greek census to ask. From that year on, no Arvanitika speaker has appeared in an official Greek statistic. A population that had lived around Athens for six hundred years simply stopped being tallied, and what a state does not count, it does not have to explain.
When the linguist Peter Trudgill went into Arvanite villages in the 1970s, he found fluent grandparents, hesitant parents, and children who understood scraps and answered in Greek. That is the exact pattern linguists call language death in progress. UNESCO now lists Arvanitika as severely endangered. From a newspaper curiosity to the edge of extinction in three generations — that is the speed of it.
What the clipping actually proves
Be precise about this, because overclaiming is how a good source gets wasted.
It does not prove Athens was “really Albanian,” and anyone waving it around for that purpose should first reckon with the Arvanite admirals who bled for the Greek flag. These villagers’ own descendants would reject the framing — in Greek.
What it proves is narrower and harder to dismiss: in 1901 the multilingual reality of Attica was public, printed for schoolchildren an ocean away, and its later disappearance from Greek public memory was not simple forgetting. Forgetting is passive. This was produced — by schools, by conscription, by stigma, by a census that stopped asking. Each mechanism looks ordinary on its own. Together they are airtight.
Greece is not unusual in this. France did a version of it to Breton and Occitan. The young Albanian state ran its own pressure on Greek-speakers in the south — a history Albanians should own with the same honesty we ask of others; Greece’s Greek minority in Albania is recognized today precisely because that pressure was real. Nation-states manufacture their own uniformity and then call it ancient. That is close to the job description.
But the Greek case has a bitter distinction. The language that was erased belonged to the families who helped found the state that erased it. The revolution’s own admirals could not have passed a Greek-only language test.
A children’s newspaper in Minneapolis preserved, by accident, a snapshot the official record kept no room for. The question it leaves is not really about Greece. How many other communities — in how many other countries — lived an hour from a capital speaking a language no official ever bothered to write down, and vanished without so much as a curiosity item to mark that they were there?
That is the whole case for counting people while they are still here. It is the reason the National Albanian Registry exists: a community that keeps its own count is much harder to un-remember. If you are Albanian American, being counted takes about two minutes — and it is the one record that answers to your family, not to anyone else’s arithmetic.
Sources
- The Journal Junior (Minneapolis Journal weekly supplement), August 31, 1901, p. 8. Library of Congress, Chronicling America, sn83045366, sequence 36. Digitized by the Minnesota Historical Society.
- Peter Trudgill, fieldwork and publications on Arvanitika and language death (1970s onward).
- Lukas Tsitsipis, A Linguistic Anthropology of Praxis and Language Shift: Arvanitika (Albanian) and Greek in Contact (Oxford, 1998).
- Arvanites and Arvanitika — Wikipedia overviews with source citations.
- UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger — entry for Arvanitika.
- Greek census of 1951 — the final Greek census to record Albanian-speakers.