as Voulgaris and Kodrikas did, that all the Orthodox believers of the Balkans could form a single political community united by the Orthodox Church and its Ancient Greek language, regardless of the many different vernaculars spoken in the home; but the establishment of the Exarchate marked the end of that dream. A generation of bright young men from all over the (still Ottoman-occupied) Balkans had indeed come to the University of Athens (founded 1837) to study Greek language and culture, but when they returned to their homelands they did not serve as Greek cultural missionaries (although in many cases they continued to correspond with each other in Greek). Instead they founded national movements of their own, promoted the literary and official use of their own spoken languages, and established the use of those languages in church. This removed yet another justification for the official use of the ancient language in the Greek state; it was clearly about to lose its old status as a common language for Orthodox worship across the Balkans. On the other hand, the political importance of demotic had increased. In this time of national awakenings, the language spoken in the home had become much more important in defining ethnicity than the old religious classifications used by the Ottomans. This had happened first in Serbia, then Romania and Bulgaria, and was about to happen in Albania; inevitably the mood spread to Greece too, where actually speaking demotic Greek began to seem as important as merely possessing the Greek 'national consciousness' () on which previous generations had placed such high hopes. This was also a time for re-drawing borders in the Balkans. For the past century the European Powers had been engaged with the Eastern Question, of how to deal with the slow disintegration of the Ottoman Empire; and following the 1878 Congress of Berlin, the Great Powers in 1881 forced the Ottomans to cede Thessaly to Greece. This brought the northern border closer to the southern border of the newly established autonomous principality of Bulgaria. The two young nations now faced each other across a strip of Ottoman territory inhabited by a patchwork of communities speaking demotic Greek, Bulgarian, Aromanian and Albanian. The Greek, Bulgarian and Romanian governments now began to promote their respective languages and interests by opening new primary schools all over the Ottoman territory. Slav-speaking parents could now send their children to Bulgarian-sponsored schools