where they would learn to read and write the language they used at home, and (if their district had joined the Exarchate) in church. By contrast the Greek-sponsored schools could still offer only Ancient Greek, in a curriculum that had begun to seem unsatisfactory even in Greece itself, and an appeal to a Greek 'national consciousness'. This was far less successful after 1870 than in the centuries before. Now that it had come down to a contest of languages, it began to seem that (if only for reasons of political strategy) it might be a good idea to value more highly the demotic actually spoken by many inhabitants of the disputed territory. In the years following the 1878 Congress, for the first time, a 'demoticist current' began to flow in the Greek political world. Folklore, history and continuity As early as 1857 some efforts had been made to collect phrases, proverbs, songs, narratives and all kinds of traditions from schoolchildren; but the systematic and scholarly study of folklore was established in Greece by the young , when his Study of the Culture of the Modern Greeks was published in two parts in 1871–74. This explicitly linked modern customs to ancient ones. The study of (national folklore) swiftly gained momentum among scholars eager to demonstrate the cultural and territorial continuity of the Greek people in their homeland since ancient times. This was not unconnected to the political situation. Just as the creation of Katharevousa had answered the political needs of its time (throwing off the Turkish yoke, erasing the traces of servitude and regaining cultural parity with Enlightenment Europe), so now the laografia movement served the new "national struggle" against the Slav territorial threat in the north. This new-found enthusiasm for continuity also applied to historians. In 1874 Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos completed his monumental History of the Greek Nation, presenting a unified and continuous story "from Agamemnon to George I" (as Hatzidakis put it later). This gave equal weight to the Classical and the post-Classical (especially Byzantine) periods, which many in Korais' time had dismissed as wasted centuries of subjection to 'Oriental despotism'. Now "our medieval kingdom" was embraced as an essential part of the Greek story. With the newly celebrated continuity of culture and history came recognition of the continuity of the spoken language, and a new respect for demotic as the true voice of an ancient nation emerging from a