In Greek history, the term Krifó scholió (Greek "κρυφό σχολειό" or "κρυφό σχολείο", lit. "Secret school") refers to supposedly illegal underground schools for teaching the Greek language

Greek language

Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...

 and Christian doctrines, provided by the Greek Orthodox Church

Eastern Orthodox Church

The Orthodox Church, officially called the Orthodox Catholic Church and commonly referred to as the Eastern Orthodox Church, is the second largest Christian denomination in the world, with an estimated 300 million adherents mainly in the countries of Belarus, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Georgia, Greece,...

 under Ottoman rule

Ottoman Greece

Most of Greece gradually became part of the Ottoman Empire from the 15th century until its declaration of independence in 1821, a historical period also known as Tourkokratia ....

 in Greece

Greece

Greece , officially the Hellenic Republic , and historically Hellas or the Republic of Greece in English, is a country in southeastern Europe....

 between the 15th and 19th centuries. The existence of such schools is today believed by most scholars to be a national myth.

It is widely believed in Greece today that the Ottoman authorities prohibited education in the languages of non-Muslim subject peoples. Greeks were therefore forced to cater for their basic education needs through small, secretly organized underground schools, which were run illegally in monasteries and churches. Supposed sites of such secret schools are today shown in many places in Greece. These schools are often credited with having played a decisive role in keeping Greek language and literacy alive through the period of Turkish rule.

Against this view, most historians now agree that there is no historical evidence that such schools ever existed. Within the Ottoman millet

Millet (Ottoman Empire)

Millet is a term for the confessional communities in the Ottoman Empire. It refers to the separate legal courts pertaining to "personal law" under which communities were allowed to rule themselves under their own system...

 system, the Orthodox Church was responsible for most aspects of civil administration for the Christian population, and it had a high degree of autonomy in running its own affairs. Hence the church was free to run schools wherever it desired. The existence of many public, legally operated Greek schools is in fact well attested, especially in the larger towns after the 17th century, although the church never went so far as to organize a full-scale school programme for the whole of the population. Much schooling was probably done through small-scale, privately organized teaching in churches and monasteries, but there is no evidence that such activities were illegal or repressed.

Τhe myth of the secret schools emerged after Greece had begun its War of Independence

Greek War of Independence

The Greek War of Independence, also known as the Greek Revolution was a successful war of independence waged by the Greek revolutionaries between...

 in 1821. The first mention of such schools has been traced to 1825, in a work of the German scholar Carl Iken, quoting information given to him by a Greek scholar, Stephanos Kanellos. The notion of the secret school became more popular and more entrenched in the collective memory of Greeks through a painting of that name by Nikolaos Gyzis, of 1885-86 (today in the Emphietzoglou Collection

Emphietsoglou Gallery Museum

The Emphietsoglou Gallery Museum is an art Gallery in Athens, Greece. It is sited in Marousi near the metro station. Its founder Prodromos Emphietsoglou gave his private art collection of over 500 works to the public....

, Athens). It depicts a romanticized scene of such a school, with the venerable figure of an old orthodox priest reading by candlelight to a group of boys and young men in the traditional attire of Greek klepht

Klepht

Klephts were self-appointed armatoloi, anti-Ottoman insurgents, and warlike mountain-folk who lived in the countryside when Greece was a part of the Ottoman Empire...

s.

Equally popular was a poem, of the same title, by Ioannis Polemis (1900). Its first stanza runs:

Απ' έξω μαυροφόρ' απελπισιά,
πικρής σκλαβιάς χειροπιαστό σκοτάδι,
και μέσα στη θολόκτιστη εκκλησιά,
στην εκκλησιά, που παίρνει κάθε βράδυ
την όψη του σχολειού,
το φοβισμένο φως του καντηλιού
τρεμάμενο τα ονείρατα αναδεύει,
και γύρω τα σκλαβόπουλα μαζεύει.

There is also a popular nursery rhyme, sung to the tune of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star

Twinkle Twinkle Little Star

"Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" is a popular English nursery rhyme. The lyrics are from an early nineteenth-century English poem, "The Star" by Jane Taylor. The poem, which is in couplet form, was first published in 1806 in Rhymes for the Nursery, a collection of poems by Taylor and her sister Ann...

, attested since the 19th century, which perpetuates the notion that such schools typically took place at night for greater secrecy:

Φεγγαράκι μου λαμπρό,
φέγγε μου να περπατώ,
να πηγαίνω στο σκολειό,
να μαθαίνω γράμματα,
του Θεού τα πράματα.

Among scholars who argued against the existence of the "secret schools" as early as the first half of the 20th century, Angelou lists the historians Dimitrios Kambouroglou, Manuel Gedeon, and Yannis Vlachoyannis.

One of the few scholarly works that has seriously argued for the existence of such schools was written by G. Chassiotis in 1881 ; Gritsopoulos has also published supporting their existence, though allowing for the continuation of Greek-language higher education in Constantinople in the early Ottoman empire. Outside the scholarly literature, there continues to be considerable support for the existence of these schools.