Albert Long (December 4, 1832, Washington, Pennsylvania - July 28, 1901, Liverpool, England) was an American Methodist pastor who devoted much of his life preaching in the Balkans.[ Д-р Алберт Лонг – американецът българин.]
Biography
Albert Limerick Long was born on December 4, 1832, in Washington, Pennsylvania. He was the son of a highly respected clergyman.
Among the schoolmates of his childhood were
Andrew Carnegie and
Matthew Quay. He was educated at Western University of Pennsylvania and at Alleghany College, Meadville, Pennsylvania. He also studied at the Concord Biblical Institute (now University of Boston). 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 Constantinople, 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.
[Велислава Дърева, Коректурите на Джъстин. Част трета: Мълчанието на българските историци, в-к Дума, 07 Юли 2011; брой: 153.] 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.
[David S. Katz, The Shaping of Turkey in the British Imagination, 1776–1923, Springer, 2016, , pp. 153-154.] 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.
Long contributed greatly to the translation of the first edition of the Bible in modern Bulgarian language.[Karine V. Walther, Sacred Interests: The United States and the Islamic World, 1821-1921, UNC Press Books, 2015, , p. 74.] Together with Dr. Elias Riggs, they made a translation using the former translation of Neofit Rilski. For twelve years they worked with Petko Slaveikov, Konstantin Fotinov and Hristodul Kostovich.[Lina Gergova, Tanya Matanova, Yana Gergova, Cultural Heritage in Migration, editor Nikolai Vukov, 2018, , p. 267.] In 1871 the first edition of the Bulgarian Bible was printed in Constantinople in semi-standardized Bulgarian language. From 1864 to 1872, Long edited and published the monthly magazine Zornitsa, the first Bulgarian Christian magazine.[Tatyana Nestorova, American Missionaries Among the Bulgarians, 1858-1912, East European monographs, 1987, , p. 91.] In 1870 Albert Long published a short history of the Bulgarians, under the title "The Slavs and the Bulgarians".[Stojan Č Rajčevski, America and the Bulgarians: Till the Constituent Assembly of 1879, Bulgarian Bestseller, National Museum of Bulgarian Books and Polygraphy, 2003, , p. 138.] From 1872 to 1901 he was professor of natural sciences at Robert College in Constantinople. He later became vice president of Robert College.[Ann Pottinger Saab, Reluctant Icon: Gladstone, Bulgaria, and the Working Classes, 1856-1878, Harvard University Press, 1991, , p. 83.] He died at Liverpool, England on his journey to America on July 28, 1901. He was buried in St James Cemetery, Liverpool.
Honours
Notes
External links
See also
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Bible translations into Bulgarian
-
Protestantism in Bulgaria
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Union of Evangelical Congregational Churches in Bulgaria
