Government documents and newspapers were consequently published in ''Katharevousa'' (purified) Greek, a form which few ordinary Greeks could read. Liberals favoured recognising Demotic as the national language, but conservatives and the Orthodox Church resisted all such efforts, to the extent that, when the New Testament was translated into Demotic in 1901, riots erupted in Athens and the government fell (the ''Evangeliaka''). This issue would continue to plague Greek politics until the 1970s.