Long was born on December 4 , 1832 , in Washington , Pennsylvania . At the age of 24 , he graduated with awards for his theological education and was invited to become a missionary to the Methodist Episcopal Church and to move to the Balkans . He accepted , and on June 27 , 1857 , he departed for the Ottoman Empire . During the three-month-long journey by ship , Long intensively studied Bulgarian . He used the first Bulgarian textbook for foreigners " Notes on Bulgarian Grammar " , written by another missionary Elias Riggs . After his arrival , he settled in Shumen , now in Bulgaria , and began studying Greek and Turkish . Long befriended with the local intelligentsia . Two years later he moved to Tarnovo . In 1859 he established a Bulgarian Methodist Episcopal Church . In 1863 he moved to Istanbul , the Ottoman capital , to become the overseer of the Mission of the Methodist Episcopal Church for Bulgarian lands . He was one of the greatest advocates before the Ottoman authorities in favor of the Armenian cause during the massacre of 75,000 Armenians in 1896 , part of the Hamidian massacres . Long personally translated the records of Archimandrite Metodi Kusev detailing the atrocities of the suppression of the 1876 April Uprising in Bulgaria and handed them over to a reporter of the Daily News . Again , he urged the US Consul General in Istanbul , Eugene Schuyler , to visit the town of Batak and to assure the credibility of the information about the Batak massacre . The actions of these men helped to form a '' casus belli '' for the 1877 – 1878 Russo-Turkish War , which led to Bulgarian liberation
Hamidian massacres
Hamidian massacres
Albert Long