Konstantinos Tsioulkas

Konstantinos I. Tsioulkas (Greek: Κωνσταντίνος Ι. Τσιούλκας; c. 1845 - 1915) was a Greek educator and writer from Western Macedonia.

Biography

Tsioulkas was born in about 1845 in Korisos, Kastoria, into a family of farmers. According to Peter Mackridge, his family might have been primarily Greek-speaking. After his graduation from the main school of his village, he continued his studies with a scholarship in the Educational Association of Kastoria in the Gymnasium of Kasoria and then he taught in the Greek school of his birthplace. He opposed the attempts of the Exarchists to hold the Divine Liturgy in Bulgarian and in 1871, he succeeded together with others to drive Konstantinos Darzilovites, who, according to Tsioulkas, was the first to teach the Slavic speakers that they were Bulgarians, out of Gorenchi, just before a Bulgarian school was founded. In 1875, he was sent with a scholarship from Bellios a bequest in Athens, where he studied in the Philosophic School of the National University. In 1879, he went to Monastiri (Bitola), where he became the first gymnasiarch of the Greek gymnasium for a decade, until 1889, when he was fired because of the events relating to Pichion.

Contributions to the bilingualism of the Macedonians

In 1907, he published in Athens a 350-page work of his Contributions to the bilingualism of the Macedonians by comparing the slavic-seeming Macedonian language with the Greek one ("Συμβολαί εις την διγλωσσίαν των Μακεδόνων εκ συγκρίσεως της σλαβοφανούς μακεδονικής γλώσσης προς την ελληνικήν"), in order to fight against the Bulgarian and pan-Slavist propaganda in the region of Macedonia. Tsioulkas, who claimed not to speak any Slavic language, tried by distorting historical linguistics to prove that the language of the Slavic speakers in Ottoman Macedonia was not Bulgarian, but an Ancient Greek dialect. Tsioulkas did not focus on phonology, syntax, or morphology, for which he only devoted 11 pages in total, but mainly on the vocabulary, where it is easy to find words with common, Indo-European, etymology with Greek, in order to show that the basic elements of the Macedonian vocabulary were not Slavic, but originated from Greek.