Chapter 1 Grassroots internationalism from small places: pen, ink and the forging of friendships in a constructed language

The bridge between Scotland and Bulgaria

As a fragile link between Scotland and a rural place in wider Esperantujo, the postcard from Harmanli was only one of over fifty that John Beveridge received between 1908 and 1910.⁹ While a few more pieces of correspondence were certainly sent back and forth, this postcard is one of the few surviving sources that allow us to reconstruct this connection between Dundee and Harmanli.

The postcards sent to John Beveridge point to an uneven archival situation. We know much more about Beveridge than about his correspondents. We know which correspondents wrote to Beveridge but, in most cases, we do not know what he wrote or whether he responded at all. We can safely assume that most of Beveridge’s correspondents were ordinary Esperanto speakers, who could be members of local Esperanto clubs and who might or might not have used the language to participate in international Esperanto congresses and meet fellow speakers in person.

In many ways, John Beveridge was also an ordinary Esperanto speaker. As a Presbyterian clergyman, he looked after his parish and lived with his family of six, among them his four children. In his free time, he took to Esperanto to communicate and correspond with people outside Dundee about various topics of his interest. He was, after all, an active member of the Dundee Esperanto Club (which we discuss in detail in Chapter 2), served as the first President of the Scottish Esperanto Federation in 1909–10, and travelled abroad to participate in the 1912 Universal Congress of Esperanto in Kraków – the only one he ever attended.

The trip to Kraków may have been the pinnacle of John Beveridge’s life with Esperanto. For a few days in the summer of 1912, he met fellow Esperanto speakers from across the world. Yet, John Beveridge’s overall engagement with the language was not one of mobility. For him and his correspondents, Esperanto was primarily a venture that involved writing, sending and receiving postcards and letters, and participating in a community of strangers connected by emerging technologies. Esperanto and postcards were two of these and a perfect match.

In the communicative landscape around 1900, with novel technologies ranging from telegraphy and telephony to photography, the image of Harmanli may have been the only glimpse of a rural Bulgarian town John Beveridge would ever acquire, as well as the most direct link to the person Beveridge corresponded with. Gathering for the photo on the Harmanli postcard in Figure 1.1, the men by the bridge may have looked familiar and yet different to what Beveridge witnessed in his everyday life. Some are wearing beards and hats, some are smoking pipes, as was the custom in those days. Some men may have been local townspeople, craftsmen or landowners. Three men are wearing some kind of uniform, as they perhaps were local gendarmes, officers or military personnel. Also, a few fellow clergymen appear in the picture. Yet this is where things may have looked less familiar to Beveridge, as they are donned in a dark cloak and hat, both reminiscent of the eastern Orthodox church. Two men on the bank of the river, one sitting and one with a dog on a leash, appear to be wearing a turban and Muslim attire.

Bulgaria was only nine years older than Esperanto. A territory of the Ottoman Empire for several hundred years, Bulgaria became a principality in 1878. Its boundaries were contested, leading to numerous treaties and warfare between Bulgaria and Serbia before the former effectively became an independent state in September 1908. Smaller than and different from the initial 1878 boundaries, the new state had a sizeable Muslim community.¹⁰

We may not know how much John Beveridge knew about Bulgaria, but the postcard provided him with at least a snapshot of this distant place. The piece of correspondence from Harmanli was sent in June 1908, just months before the country at the other end of Europe declared independence. So, what was the content of the postcard once Beveridge turned from the image side to the written text? His correspondent wrote the following (Figure 1.2):

Estimata samideano,¹¹ Kun tiu ĉi letero mi sciigas vin ke mi ricevis la markojn kiun vi sendas al mia frato St. Kirilov kiu estas forveturinta alian urbon kie li restos 2 monatoj kaj kredu kiam estos reveninta tuje respondas al vi. Mi petas bonvole respondi por la ricevo de mia karto.

Kun saluto samideana Fina Nedenka Kirilova Harmanli Bulgarujo.¹²

As short as the text is, this exchange offers several clues that substantiate key aspects of the then emerging Esperanto community.¹³ First, the sender was only partially familiar with Esperanto, which becomes evident in the language errors in the brief message and the lack of any indication of a sophisticated command of the language. Second, assuming that her first language was Bulgarian, she was likely more used to Cyrillic and, for this reason, perhaps not accustomed to writing in the Latin script. Hence, just as with the bridge in the image, writing in Esperanto denoted here an attempt to leave one’s linguistic comfort zone to build bridges between people from different linguistic backgrounds – in this case, a bridge connecting a Bulgarian speaker and an English speaker.

Additionally, the content was about a rather mundane form of internationalism: the interest in and exchange of stamps. This was in fact not uncommon among Esperanto speakers, given how stamp collecting and philately were fashionable at the time.¹⁴ Around 1900, it must have been exciting to receive stamps from an out-of-the-way place that would otherwise remain unknown. As mundane as this exchange between Dundee and Harmanli may seem, it points towards another common thread in the use of Esperanto: an openness and curiosity about the world and other peoples.¹⁵

Finally, the sender signs off as ‘Nedenka Kirilova’, as someone responding on behalf of ‘my brother St. Kirilov’. The person John Beveridge initially contacted and sent postal stamps to must have been a man named Stoičo Kirilov – and Nedenka Kirilova, his sister. How did these three people find one another?

Yearbooks, address directories and postal stamps: mapping Esperantujo through its exchanges

One way for Esperanto speakers to locate potential pen pals was through the Jarlibro – the yearbook that listed the addresses of fellow speakers around the world. Beyond the act of designing a language, the making of Esperantujo also involved gathering people who were willing to learn and use Esperanto. In this regard, the Jarlibro became one of the backbones of what would progressively develop as a networked and interconnected language community.

When Ludwik Zamenhof published the first Esperanto textbook – later known as Unua Libro (First Book, 1887) – he included a postcard-like coupon on the final page of this booklet. This detachable coupon was an invitation for readers interested in the language to send their contact details back to Zamenhof, so that he could compile a directory containing the names and contact details of those committed to learning Esperanto.¹⁶

It did not take long for these coupons to reach Warsaw. From 1889 to 1908, the names and addresses of Esperanto speakers were published in the Adresaro de la personoj, kiuj ellernis la lingvon ‘Esperanto’ (Directory of the Persons Who Learned the Language ‘Esperanto’).¹⁷ From 1904, these address lists were regularly published by the Paris-based publishing house Hachette as Tutmonda Jarlibro Esperantista (Worldwide Esperantist Yearbook). Each volume consisted of over 300 pages with an ever-growing list of Esperanto speakers and clubs catalogued by country.

While the people listed in these yearbooks and address directories were mostly strangers to each other and lived in different – usually geographically disconnected – places, these directories allowed any person anywhere to reach out to fellow Esperanto speakers. Zamenhof did not expect them to know one another or ever meet one another in person – although many did at the level of international Esperanto congresses. Rather, the Jarlibro aimed to enable those who were willing and curious to forge distant friendships and communicate with pen pals. Congresses – in particular the annual international congresses held from 1905 onwards – were certainly a highlight of the Esperanto experience, but only for those who had the time and financial means to attend them. On a daily basis, however, the making of Esperantujo relied not on large gatherings but on the ability to find one another and maintain contact through the postal system. Esperanto had not just been devised as a bridge of words between language communities: it became a bridge between places.¹⁸

John Beveridge owned two editions of the Jarlibro, from 1907 and 1910. As a member of the Dundee Esperanto Club, he participated in social gatherings at the local level, yet the major purpose and excitement of Esperanto was to reach beyond the local. A key way to do so was via correspondence.

Back to the Harmanli postcard, the 1907 Jarlibro lists an Esperanto group by the name of ‘Progreso’ (Progress) in Harmanli.¹⁹ The club was founded in November 1906, around two years after the Dundee club. Both clubs were part of a wider boom, in particular in 1905 and 1906, as the first international congress of Esperanto in 1905 had given the emerging community a boost and as newspapers across Europe were covering Esperanto extensively.²⁰ But what did Esperanto in Bulgaria look like?

In 1907, the Harmanli group consisted of thirteen members – eleven men and two women – including the president, a certain Velev Jurdan and the secretary, Stoičo Kirilov. This was the man John Beveridge reached out to (or back) in order to exchange stamps. While Stoičo Kirilov is elusive, Velev Jurdan is listed in the Jarlibro as a shoemaker, and four other club members were merchants. The two women were unmarried and described as ‘fraŭlino’ (Miss). Nedenka Kirilova is not listed as a member of the local club, yet she had at least a basic command of the language. Therefore, however systematic the Jarlibro might have been to map this non-territorial community, it did not capture all Esperanto learners and speakers.

Centring this analysis on a postcard from Harmanli may seem unusual but, as a place, Harmanli is interesting in itself. Small, unassuming and relatively unknown, the town is located about halfway along a trade route between Sofia and Istanbul. Harmanli was then multilingual, situated in an imperial borderland in flux with Bulgarian and Turkish speakers not far from the soon-to-be Bulgarian state borders, with Greece to the south. If Dundee was enmeshed in the jute and whaling trade, Harmanli was entangled in the trade of territories and the conflicts that went with it. Both were, in different ways, small but nonetheless geopolitically significant.

Harmanli and, more broadly, Bulgaria may not be the first places one has in mind when thinking about Esperanto or about a transnational history of Europe. However, they constitute intriguingly active clusters in early Esperanto history. After the very first Esperanto clubs emerged in Nürnberg (1888), Uppsala (1891), St Petersburg (1892) and Odessa (1894), a club was founded in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, in 1901, along with a Bulgara Societo Esperantista. Three years later, we find Esperanto speakers and clubs in 114 places across Bulgaria, a rather astonishing number for a relatively small country.²¹

Some clubs like the one in Plovdiv featured 51 members by 1904. Silistra, located on the border with Romania, had 88 members, while the Jarlibro lists 106 Esperanto speakers in Sofia. These were the larger cities, and in a city like Sofia the dominant professions among the local Esperanto speakers were oficisto (white-collar worker or civil servant), soldato (military personnel), instruisto (teacher) and studento (student). In Plovdiv, a fair number of Esperanto speakers were listed as telefonisto (telephone operator), stenografisto (stenographer) and telegrafisto (telegrapher). These were people that dealt on a daily basis with the latest communication technologies in their professional lives. Many others, in places like Pleven or Harmanli, appear as komercisto (merchant). For professionals like merchants and telephone operators, Esperanto had a practical and functional element. It was appealing to learn a language that allowed for easy and effective cross-border communication, at a time when Bulgara Esperantisto – one of the at least five Esperanto periodicals existing in Bulgaria around 1900 – regularly listed a number of Bulgarians who ‘deziras interŝangi ilustritajn poŝtkartojn, gazetojn kaj markojn’ (wish to exchange illustrated postcards, magazines and postal stamps).²²

The striking pattern, however, lies beyond the larger cities and beyond the political, commercial and cultural hubs. Out of the overall 114 places where Esperanto speakers are listed in Bulgaria in 1904, a total of 61 places only had one or two speakers, and another 15 places only had three speakers at the time. Even though many of these people were in semi-rural areas and villages, they were part of the interconnected world of Esperantujo, most likely simply yearning to learn about the world beyond a small town in Bulgaria.²³ However surprising, the distribution of Esperanto speakers in Bulgaria was consequential: Bulgaria was a nation-state in the making at the time.²⁴ In it, amidst Greek, Turkish and Romanian speakers, Esperanto fell on fertile ground. It became associated with a certain vision of modernity – one rooted in a quest for mutual understanding through an international auxiliary language thought of as a means to overcome language barriers and nationalist rivalries.

Greetings from Kymi: a railway station in Finland and its vegetarian officer

The postcard from Harmanli was not unique. John Beveridge corresponded with many other Esperanto speakers on a range of topics, including the mutual exchange of stamps and other shared interests. Postcards from Turku and Kymi in Finland, from Hradec Králové in Austria–Hungary or from Sarajevo in Bosnia arrived in 1908 alongside stamps and further addresses of potential Esperanto pen pals.

One such postcard was sent to Dundee from Kymi in August 1908 by John Beveridge’s pen pal Hugo Salokannel (1880–1966). This was one of at least three mails Beveridge received from Salokannel between 1908 and 1910, which indicates a more sustained correspondence. In this postcard, Salokannel thanked Beveridge for his previous postcard, also sending the latter a photograph of the former: ‘La kostumo, en kiu mi estas vestita reprezentas tiun de fervojistoj en Finnlando’ (The outfit in which I am dressed represents that of the railway workers in Finland). In return, Salokannel asked Beveridge to send a photo of himself so that he could add it to his album, ending his postcard with ‘Amikan saluton!’ (Friendly salutations!). The correspondence between the two had sparked a personal interest in seeing the face and attire of the person at the other end of the exchange, pointing to their curiosity to get to know one another within Esperantujo.

Beside his photo, Salokannel listed the addresses of three Finnish Esperanto speakers, recommending Beveridge to contact them to further exchange postcards and stamps. The three locations – in the towns of Kymi, Karhula and Hyvinkää – were, respectively, in rural southern Finland, north of Helsinki and further east on the southern coast. These locations epitomised geographical patterns akin to the previously described Harmanli and the wider small-town Esperanto landscape in Bulgaria.

Browsing through the Jarlibro, none of these locations seemed to have a local club. Kymi only had one Esperanto speaker in 1904 – another railway officer, by the name Wilhelm Lönnqvist.²⁵ Tampere and Helsinki hosted the only two Esperanto clubs listed in Finland at the time. While Bulgaria boasted many more clubs and had overall far more locations with a few Esperanto speakers than Finland, paying attention to these two countries illustrates a striking pattern: Esperanto had reached the rural hinterlands of Europe. If we imagine the world around 1908 from small-town settings like Kymi or Harmanli, the possibility of getting a glimpse of distant places via postcards, stamps or a photograph featuring a person’s face and outfit must have been thrilling. These exchanges gave pen pals a sense of participation in a much wider world than everyday life in a small town otherwise allowed.²⁶

It is important to consider that Esperanto did not just come to these people, nor was it imposed on them by a hegemonic nation-state or by Zamenhof. People like Beveridge, Kirilov and Salokannel actively reached out for Esperanto, and they embraced it on their own terms. Technologies and infrastructure from railways and telegraphy to a well-oiled, cross-border postal system had reached these places then, making them more connected than they were a few decades earlier.²⁷ Esperanto, then, emerged as an ideal tool that, aligned with these novel technologies, allowed ordinary people to partake in this wave of globalisation. In many ways, beyond being a language, Esperanto was just another invention of the time.

Revealing in terms of the popularity of forging friendships across Esperantujo are the closing lines of Hugo Salokannel’s earlier-mentioned postcard: ‘Ĉu vi havas multajn korespondantojn? Mi havas ilin nun tro multe’ (Do you have many correspondents? I now have too many of them). By his own account, Salokannel, the railway station officer stationed near Karhula, some eighty kilometres east of Helsinki, was heavily invested in Esperanto correspondence networks by 1908.

As rural and unassuming as his life may have been, Salokannel lived a very active life for an Esperanto speaker. He learned Esperanto around 1904, becoming proficient in it a few years later.²⁸ The postcard itself demonstrates elegance, sophistication and familiarity with writing in the language. Both Beveridge and Salokannel were first-generation Esperanto speakers, yet they crossed paths with Esperanto at different stages of their lives: Beveridge was in his early to mid-forties, while Salokannel was in his early twenties. Born in 1880, Hugo Salokannel was indeed of the same generation as John Beveridge’s daughters. Esperanto, it seems, did not just bridge distance and first languages but also generations. Despite their age difference, the twenty-something-year-old Finnish railway officer and the middle-aged Scottish clergyman had much in common, after all.

Both served as presidents of their respective national Esperanto associations – that is, the Finnish Esperanto Association and the Scottish Esperanto Federation. Both shared an interest in religion: Salokannel was the editor of the periodical Kristana Espero (Christian Hope), whereas Beveridge was involved in the translation of the New Testament.²⁹ Nonetheless, there were differences that may point to their respective ages at the time of writing and what they did with the language. Salokannel, it seems, was far more of an activist. He embraced several values, such as pacifism and vegetarianism, that resonated with fellow Esperanto speakers of his generation.³⁰ Such reformist ideals and alternative lifestyles indeed overlapped with the internationalist ideals linked to Esperanto. The decades around 1900 were after all a time of rapid transformation, with the heyday of empires, consumerism and industrialisation in Europe and beyond. Yet it was also a moment of counter movements and cultures, as well as various forms of resistance, from anarchism to terrorism as well as vegetarianism.³¹

Between 1914 and late in his life in the 1950s, Hugo Salokannel published in both Esperanto and Finnish, occasionally under the penname Bontemplano – Good Templar, perhaps indicating his connection with Christianity. Among his works were reflections on Christianity, Esperanto learning materials and song collections, as well as a short autobiography.³² Looking at the two pen pals, it seems that the younger one embraced a more idealistic version of what Esperanto offered.³³ Moreover, as a young railway officer, Salokannel was perhaps among the vanguard of workers – railway workers in particular – that flocked to Esperanto in the first half of the twentieth century.

A further postcard by Hugo Salokannel displays a photograph of a group of twenty-seven people on a boat, with a short note explaining that these were members of the Esperanto groups of Kymi and Kotka in an outing on the Finnish Gulf in late May 1910. Salokannel marked himself with an ‘X’, but Beveridge may have identified him anyway given the earlier photograph sent to the latter.

As popular as mass-produced postcards were, this one must have been a personalised, commissioned one. It is safe to assume that more than one copy of this postcard was produced and others may have been sent out into Esperantujo. In addition to the thousands of names listed in the Jarlibro, the faces and the people in the photograph give rare hints about the social composition of local Esperanto clubs in Finland at the time.

The group of Finnish Esperanto speakers depicted here illustrates the attraction and social appeal the language had. It shows teenagers – if not children – folks in their twenties and middle-aged women and men, some wearing distinctly middle-class outfits and hats. People were surely dressed for the day trip, most of them with clothing resembling Hugo Salokannel’s. They may have been colleagues from the railway or from other professions along the lower middle-classes. In other words, they were local, ordinary folks. Yet they were members of the Esperanto groups in Kymi and Kotka, and as such, provincial rank-and-file Esperanto speakers.

We may never know the names behind their faces, who these people were, what professions they had or what kind of lives they lived. Yet it is fair to assume that their reasons for learning an international auxiliary language did not end here on a boat on the Gulf of Finland. These people surely had similar aspirations and interests to Salokannel’s and Beveridge’s. They likely read the periodical Finna Esperantisto and had access to Esperanto magazines from abroad as these were sent back and forth between groups and members, and some of them may have had pen pals abroad.

The correspondence between John Beveridge and Hugo Salokannel lasted for at least two years. The latest recorded postcard from Salokannel to Beveridge was sent on 20 July 1910. In a brief message, the Finnish railway officer thanked Beveridge for ‘via bona kaj bela verketo’ (your good and beautiful booklet) and concluded with ‘Estu honoro al Dio!’ (May God be honoured!). Even though the number of mails exchanged between them is unclear, the content of the three surviving postcards points to a sustained correspondence, and their friendship clearly evolved beyond the exchange of postal stamps. The sheer brevity of Salokannel’s messages suggests a certain familiarity and routine-like correspondence between the two, ranging from thanks and acknowledgements of receipt to insights into life in rural Finland.

Postcards and pen pals: the making of friendships and of Esperantujo

Frequent requests for postal stamps reveal one of the systematic approaches John Beveridge used to build his network of correspondents. Like many other Esperanto speakers, Beveridge likely placed a note of interest in exchanging postcards and stamps in The British Esperantist or another periodical, which fellow Esperanto speakers then responded to. This communication system – based on yearbooks, address directories and periodicals – was widely used: magazines like Ruslanda Esperantisto (Russian Esperantist) or Fervoja Esperantisto (Railway Esperantist), to name just a few, regularly printed lists of names or personal adverts from individuals seeking postal exchanges.³⁴ Just as Salokannel had ‘too many’ pen pals, other Esperanto speakers took pride in their extensive collections of stamps from several countries. Remarks on one’s pen pals and stamp collections demonstrate the enthusiasm of Esperanto speakers for developing their worldliness.

As some of the postcards above illustrate, John Beveridge’s exchanges with his correspondents frequently went beyond icebreakers and postal stamps. In return for some stamps, Leo Jalava, a correspondent from Turku, sent Beveridge a copy of the periodical Finna Esperantisto.³⁵ Jalava pointed his Dundee pen pal to the translation of Shylock in this edition. The poem by Swedish poet Oscar Levertin (1862–1906) had been translated by Hjalmar Johannes Runeberg (1874–1934). The latter, as Jalava explained, was among ‘la plej favoraj esperantistoj finnaj’ (one of the most auspicious Finnish Esperanto speakers). Runeberg – whose photograph featured on the front side of that postcard – was indeed one of the Esperanto pioneers in Finland: Runeberg learned the language in Paris in 1901, attended the very first international congress of Esperanto, translated Swedish and Danish literature into the language and, ultimately, became the first president of the Finnish Esperanto Association.³⁶ Through exchanging periodicals, poems and translations of religious works and literature, these pen pals learned about each other’s personal pursuits, discussed their mutual interests and engendered meaningful social connections, intellectual links and friendship.³⁷

John Beveridge received many more mail items along similar lines and partly as a response to his notes of interest published in Esperanto periodicals. Alongside postcards, he received magazines including Amerika Esperantisto (US), various editions of Brazilia Revuo Esperantista (Brazil), La Verda Standardo (Hungary) and La Suno Hispana (Spain) in 1907–8.³⁸ Similarly, a certain Feliks Knapski – a merchant and member of the Esperanto club in Łódź – thanked John Beveridge for sending him English-Esperanto learning materials and, in return, Knapski sent an edition of Pola Esperantisto (Poland).³⁹ Lastly, in 1910, correspondents from Superaguy (Brazil), Tiflis (Georgia) and Madras (India/British Empire) thanked Beveridge for mailing them the booklet Prediko sur la Monto, Beveridge’s translation of the Sermon on the Mount.⁴⁰ In particular, Beveridge’s interests in Nordic cultures and languages, as well as theology, seemed to have contributed to distant yet close correspondent friendships that spanned continents.

Another common thread that brings together many of Beveridge’s pieces of correspondence relates to an attention to architectural styles of the world. Architecture, then, illustrates what we hinted at above regarding the worldliness and curiosity about other peoples that many Esperanto speakers shared. Pen pals from Hradec Králové, Nový Bydžov and Sarajevo (Austria–Hungary), as well as from Flöha (German Empire),⁴¹ featured sights or architectural landmarks ranging from churches, hotels and historical sites to wide boulevards. One correspondent from Göteborg (Sweden) thanked John Beveridge for sending an image of Dundee’s Wishart Arch and, in return, sent a postcard featuring King’s Gate Avenue, ‘unu de niaj plej belaj stratoj’ (one of our most beautiful streets). The Swedish pen pal added that Göteborg had been built during the reign of Gustav Adolf by Dutch architects and thus shared many features with cities like Antwerp.⁴²

Another correspondent, a certain Francisko Sladý, sent greetings from Kutná Hora (Austria–Hungary) in 1908. Sladý explained the architectural site featured on the postcard as being part of the Italian court and former seat of Bohemian monarchs.⁴³ The two postcards sent from Hradec Králové and Nový Bydžov (also in Bohemia, Austria–Hungary) were signed with the correspondents’ names and occupations – respectively a komercisto (merchant) and a studento (student). None of these correspondents appear in the many versions of the Jarlibro or in lists of participants of the Universal Congresses of Esperanto in those years. Yet it does not come as a surprise that Bohemia featured on John Beveridge’s map of Esperantujo so prominently. From Prague to southern and eastern Bohemia, the Esperanto landscape was booming at the time, with big cities and small towns like Pardubice, Kutná Hora and Kukleny also hosting Esperanto clubs specifically oriented to women and to workers.⁴⁴

Concluding remarks

In the early decades of the twentieth century, businesspeople, merchants, government representatives and intellectuals experienced internationalism through trips, international congresses and cross-border interactions of all sorts in other languages, without resorting to Esperanto. However, these opportunities were not available to most people, such as those Esperanto speakers who sent correspondence to Scotland from Bulgaria, Finland, Brazil or Austria–Hungary. After all, most of John Beveridge’s interlocutors were simply students, civil servants and railway workers, who had no financial means or professional opportunities to experience such heightened forms of internationalism.

For them, correspondence exchange in Esperanto with their pen pals abroad offered a simple yet feasible and surely exciting way of connecting with the wider world. Through this form of language-based, grassroots internationalism mediated by correspondence, these ordinary people encountered fellows with whom they not only shared a language, but who were also curious about their interlocutors and eager to keep the conversation going. And this brings us to a discussion about scales.

One could describe Geneva – the city that housed the headquarters of the Universala Esperanto-Asocio (World Esperanto Association, UEA) between 1908 and 1936 – or Dresden – where some 1,200 Esperanto speakers came together for the Fourth Universal Congress of Esperanto in 1908⁴⁵ – as the capital cities or centres of the Esperanto community. Regardless of how one may define the key geographies constituting this dispersed community, John Beveridge’s Dundee certainly would not feature on such a list in 1908. Hence, our experiment of placing John Beveridge’s postcards at the core of our narrative reveals unexpected layers of Esperantujo – of a language community that is (and relies on being) geographically dispersed and multisited in its own right.⁴⁶ After all, without the multilingualism and internationalism that such dispersion afforded, the use of an international auxiliary language would not reach its full potential.

Beginning our analysis from Dundee has brought us to places like Harmanli, Kymi and Kutná Hora. Yet, why would someone from these relatively ‘marginal’ places learn and use Esperanto? Perhaps this is precisely what made Esperanto and these friendships so significant to these people: the fact that Esperanto and correspondence provided them with an entryway to a set of grassroots internationalist experiences they might not have had otherwise. In Geneva, Dresden, Paris or Prague, the plethora of Esperanto courses and clubs available gave people plenty of opportunities to join this community. In small places hosting only one or two Esperanto speakers, in turn, Esperanto lived up to the promise of forging distant, yet meaningful connections across linguistic and geographical boundaries.

Despite the seemingly small size of some of these villages and towns, it would be incorrect to categorise them as marginal, peripheral or isolated. On the contrary, the postcards analysed here reveal how some of the ordinary people living in these places were well connected. These people and places were presumably on the fringes of technological developments, modernity and globalisation at the turn of the century, at a time when units of measurement were being standardised, literacy rates were increasing and postal services were progressively becoming more affordable to the lower middle classes. This marginality was not the case, however, as people in these places also partook in the transnational exchanges that postal services and an international auxiliary language could afford – which, ultimately, collapses the dichotomy of centre versus peripheries/margins.

Individuals like Beveridge, Kirilov, Salokannel and Jalava epitomise how Esperanto provided an effective communicative tool to complement the wider technological developments of the time. However simple, postcards in Esperanto conveyed a hint of what the skyline of a Bulgarian city looked like and what kinds of clothes railway workers donned in Finland. In exchanging postal stamps, these grassroots internationalists also learned about the habits and poems of other countries, discovered the shapes and historical backgrounds of architectural styles from abroad, saw each other’s faces and attires – and, in the process, made friends. This is perhaps where the main trait of samideanoj (fellow thinkers, as Esperanto speakers frequently refer to each other) lies. Ultimately, more than a matter of being able to communicate, it is a matter of being interested and deeply invested in communicating, with the language itself working as a mechanism to bring people together on the basis of this effort towards worldliness.

Notes

1. 1  French was then used as the language of international postal services, see F. H. Williamson, ‘The International Postal Service and the Universal Postal Union’, Journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 9, no. 1 (1930), 68–78.

2. 2  Julia Gillen and Nigel Hall, ‘Edwardian Postcards: Illuminating Ordinary Writing’, in The Anthropology of Writing: Understanding Textually Mediated Worlds, ed. David Barton and Uta Papen (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), 169–89.

3. 3  Kevin J. James, Melissa McAfee, Aritra Bhattacharjee, Alexandra Kurceba and Ainsley Robertson, ‘Greetings from Scotland: Postcards and the Digitisation of Travel Ephemera in the University of Guelph’s Scottish Collections’, The International Review of Scottish Studies, 44 (2019), 3–9.

4. 4  Bjarne Rogan, ‘An Entangled Object: The Picture Postcard as Souvenir and Collectible, Exchange and Ritual Communication’, Cultural Analysis 4 (2005): 1–27; Yehiel Limor and Ilan Tamir, ‘The Neglected Medium: Postage Stamps as Mass Media’, Communication Theory 31, no. 3 (2021): 491–505; Ana Fumurescu, Visualizing Agency: Postcards and Romanian National Identity (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2015).

5. 5  See Konstantinos Andriotis and Mišela Mavrič, ‘Postcard Mobility: Going Beyond Image and Text’, Annals of Tourism Research 40, no. 1 (2013): 18–39; David Prochaska and Jordana Mendelson, eds, Postcards: Ephemeral Histories of Modernity (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010).

6. 6  Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Decentering History: Local Stories and Cultural Crossings in a Global World’, History and Theory 50, no. 2 (2011): 188–202, here 190; Pierre-Yves Saunier, Transnational History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Clavin, ‘Defining Transnationalism’, Contemporary European History 14, no. 4 (2005): 421–39, here 438; Struck et al. ‘Introduction’, 577.

7. 7  Richard Wood, ‘A Voluntary Non-Ethnic, Non-Territorial Speech Community’, in Sociolinguistic Studies in Language Contact: Methods and Cases, ed. William Francis Mackey and Jacob Ornstein (The Hague: Mouton, 1979), 433–50.

8. 8  See, for instance, Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Davide Rodogno, Bernhard Struck and Jakob Vogel, eds, Shaping the Transnational Sphere: Experts, Networks and Issues from the 1840s to the 1930s (New York: Berghahn, 2014); David Brydan and Jessica Reinisch, eds, Internationalists in European History: Rethinking the Twentieth Century (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021); Jessica Reinisch, ‘Introduction: Agents of Internationalism’, Contemporary European History 25, no. 2 (2016): 195–205; Leila J. Rupp, ‘Constructing Internationalism: The Case of Transnational Women’s Organizations, 1888–1945’, The American Historical Review 99, no. 5 (1994): 1571–600; Glenda Sluga and Patricia Clavin, eds, Internationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

9. 9  John Beveridge Collection, Ms36242/198.

10. 10  See Mary Neuburger, The Orient Within: Muslim Minorities and the Negotiation of Nationhood in Modern Bulgaria (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 19–23; Emily Greble, Muslims and the Making of Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 25; John Connelly, From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 217–18, 229–30.

11. 11  The literal translation of samideano into English is ‘fellow thinker’. Commonly used as a self-referential term among Esperanto speakers, samideano draws on the assumption that Esperanto speakers would share not only the language but also a set of internationalist ideals. See Fians, Esperanto Revolutionaries and Geeks, 105–6; Forster, The Esperanto Movement, 82.

12. 12  ‘Dear fellow thinker, with this letter I inform you that I have received the stamps that you send to my brother St. Kirilov who is about to travel to another city where he will be staying for 2 months and believe me when he returns he will immediately reply to you. Please reply to the receipt of my card. With regards, fellow thinker Miss Nedenka Kirilova Harmanli Bulgaria’.

13. 13  See Matti Peltonen, ‘Clues, Margins, and Monads: The Micro-Macro Link in Historical Research’, History and Theory, 40, no. 3 (2001): 347–59.

14. 14  See Limor and Tamir, ‘The Neglected Medium’, 491–505; Steven Gelber, ‘Free Market Metaphor: The Historical Dynamics of Stamp Collecting’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 4, no. 34 (1992): 742–69.

15. 15  O’Keeffe, Esperanto and Languages of Internationalism, 74; Guilherme Fians, ‘La Kosmopolito kaj la Aliulo: Historiaj konsideroj pri diferenco kaj diverseco laŭ la vidpunkto de esperantistoj’, in En la Mondon Venis Nova Lingvo: Festlibro por la 75-Jariĝo de Ulrich Lins, ed. Hitosi Gotoo, Goro Christoph Kimura and José Antonio Vergara (New York: Mondial, 2018), 475–95.

16. 16  Forster, The Esperanto Movement, 55.

17. 17  The first volume was Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof, Adresaro de la personoj, kiuj ellernis la lingvon ‘Esperanto’ (Warsaw: Zamenhof, 1889). See Garvía, Esperanto and Its Rivals, 95, 183.

18. 18  For a brief account on Esperanto pen pals who exchanged postcards within the Soviet Union, see O’Keeffe, Esperanto and Languages of Internationalism, 73–7.

19. 19  Ménil, Félicien de, ed., Tutmonda Jarlibro Esperantista Enhavanta La Adresaron de Dro Zamenhof por 1907 (Paris: Hachette, 1907), 167.

20. 20  See, for instance, ‘The Language of the Future: The Development of Esperanto’, The Daily News, September 22, 1905; ‘Esperanto’, The Times, August 12, 1905; ‘The Boulogne Esperanto Congress’, The Times, August 11, 1905; ‘Progress of Esperanto’, Evening Standard, August 11, 1905; ‘Esperanto Weltkongress’, Allgemeine Zeitung, February 5, 1908; ‘Le Congrès universel espérantiste’, Le Progrès, September, 1906.

21. 21  Ménil, Félicien de, ed., Tutmonda Jarlibro Esperantista Enhavanta La Adresaron de Dro Zamenhof por 1904 (Paris: Hachette, 1904), x, 55–63. See also Forster, The Esperanto Movement, 19–20; on early Esperanto clubs, see Garvía, Esperanto and Its Rivals, 45–7.

22. 22  Bulgara Esperantisto, March, 1907, 10.

23. 23  Ana Velitchkova, ‘Rationalization of Belonging: Transnational Community Endurance’, International Sociology 36, no. 3 (2021): 419–38.

24. 24  Scholarship on Esperanto in Bulgaria is scarce and mainly focuses on the post-Second World War period; see Ana Velitchkova, ‘Nationalized Cosmopolitanism with Communist Characteristics: The Esperanto Movement’s Survival Strategy in Post–World War II Bulgaria’, Social Science History 46, no. 3 (2022): 617–42.

25. 25  Ménil, Tutmonda Jarlibro por 1904, 65.

26. 26  On other cases, such as Bohemia, see Bernhard Struck, ‘Licht und Schatten im Esperantoland ohne Grenzen. Ein blinder Junge aus der Provinz, ein Eskimochef aus Mähren, ein Übersetzer aus England und Anarchisten in China’, in ZwischenWelten: Grenzüberschreitungen europäischer Geschichte, ed. Katja Makhotina and Thomas Serrier (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2023), 269–82, here pp. 276–77.

27. 27  Wenzlhuemer, ‘The Dematerialization of Telecommunication, 21–2.

28. 28  See Lajos Kökény and Vilmos Bleier, eds, Enciklopedio de Esperanto (Budapest: Literatura Mondo, 1933), 823.

29. 29  See Kökény and Bleier, Enciklopedio, 220–22. On religion and the translation of the Bible, see Chapter 4.

30. 30  Garvía, Esperanto and Its Rivals.

31. 31  See Kökény and Bleier, Enciklopedio de Esperanto, 124, 130–34, 302, 391, 451. On the social transformations around 1900, see Philipp Blom, The Vertigo Years: Change and Culture in the West, 1900–1914 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2008), 193–203.

32. 32  Hugo William Salokannel, Biografiaro de l’Parencaro Salokannel (Vaasa: Ikka, 1952). See also O’Keeffe, Esperanto and Languages of Internationalism, 68.

33. 33  Garvía, Esperanto and Its Rivals, 103–11.

34. 34  Fervoja Esperantisto, December, 1910, 3. On the periodical Ruslanda Esperantisto, see O’Keeffe, Esperanto and Languages of Internationalism, 61.

35. 35  John Beveridge Collection, Ms36242/123.

36. 36  Kökény and Bleier, Enciklopedio, 219; Oskar Levertin, ‘Shylock. Poemo de O. Levertin, esperantigis Hj. J. Runeberg,’ Finna Esperantisto, 1909.

37. 37  See also O’Keeffe, Esperanto and Languages of Internationalism, 73f.

38. 38  John Beveridge Collection, Bev PM8201.S7B.

39. 39  John Beveridge Collection, Ms36242/117. See also Aleksander Bolesław Brzostowksi, ed., Adresaro de Polaj Esperantistoj por 1909 (Warsaw: Jan Günther, 1909), 35.

40. 40  John Beveridge Collection, Ms36242/175, Ms36242/199 and Ms36242/176, respectively.

41. 41  John Beveridge Collection, Ms36242/165, Ms36242/166, Ms36242/120 and Ms36242/195, respectively.

42. 42  John Beveridge Collection, Ms36242/112.

43. 43  John Beveridge Collection, Ms36242/122.

44. 44  Stanisłav Kamarýt, Historio de la Esperanto-Movado en Čehoslovakio: Iom da Historio kaj Iom da Rememoroj (Prague: Čeha Esperanto-Asocio, 1983).

45. 45  Ziko Marcus Sikosek, Sed Homoj kun Homoj: Universalaj Kongresoj de Esperanto, 1905–2005 (Rotterdam: Universala Esperanto-Asocio, 2005).

46. 46  See George Marcus, ‘Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography’, Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 95–117.