Januarius MacGahan's dispatches from the 1876 April Uprising in Bulgaria horrified Europe with reports of an Ottoman massacre of Orthodox Christians in Batak.
"Homicide on a grand scale used to be termed a "massacre," and some still prefer that unambiguous term, though in the 20th century we learned more diplomatic turns of phrase, such as "genocide" and "ethnic cleansing." By whatever name you call it, mass murder has been around at least since the Israelites staked their claim to Canaan.
The modern era of genocide began in a forgotten corner of the Ottoman empire—not in Armenia in 1915, as many people believe, but in a small Bulgarian village in 1876. That event—the massacre of the residents of Batak—was part of the April Uprising against Ottoman rule in Bulgaria. Today it is a mere footnote in history. The Ottoman Turks were Muslims, and their Bulgarian subjects were Eastern Orthodox Christians, so what began as a war of independence quickly escalated into holy war. During the uprising, while the Western world expressed outrage and issued strongly worded denunciations, the forces of Sultan Abdülaziz slaughtered upward of 15,000 Bulgarians.
As horrific as events in Bulgaria were, Americans would have taken scant notice—in 1876 the only "massacre" the nation cared about was the one on the banks of the Little Bighorn River on June 25—but for the fact that an Ohio-born journalist, Januarius Aloysius MacGahan, first reported details of the slaughter in Batak. The 32-year-old correspondent for London's Daily News is justly recalled as one of the first investigative journalists in history…"
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