Bulgarian Bestseller Publishing House, driven by a deep awareness of its cultural and historical duty, has prepared for printing a monumental, unprecedented in its significance edition – a volume that brings together under a common cover two of the most fateful documents of European and world humanitarian thought of the 19th century, which marked the beginning of the moral turning point in the attitude of the civilized world towards the Bulgarian question.
This luxurious volume brings together the immortal letters of the American journalist January McGahan, entitled “The Turkish Atrocities in Bulgaria During the April Uprising,” and the fiery, public-consciousness-shaking pamphlets of the great British statesman and humanist William Ewart Gladstone, published under the title “The Bulgarian Horrors and the Eastern Question. Lessons in Massacre, or the Conduct of the Turkish Government in and Around Bulgaria.”
The collection of these two fundamental texts in a single volume is not simply a publishing act, but a deeply symbolic gesture of gratitude – a kind of pantheon of words in which the voices of two men from different continents, united by the common cause of humanity, continue to sound with undiminished force today, a century and a half later.
The present edition is dedicated to the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the writing of McGahan’s unique, scorchingly truthful letters – correspondences that not only reflect, but literally tear the veil of silence and reveal before the eyes of the entire civilised world the horrific, inhuman Turkish atrocities committed against the peaceful Bulgarian population during the suppression of the April Uprising in 1876. It was these letters, originally published in the Daily News newspaper, and subsequently translated and distributed throughout Europe, that became a moral detonator with historical dimensions – they caused an unprecedented public response that went beyond the boundaries of journalistic sensation and transformed into the sharp, urgent and categorical raising of the issue of the injustice, suffering and systematic destruction of Bulgarians within the Ottoman Empire.
It was this powerful moral impulse, generated by McGahan’s words and supported by the authoritative voice of Gladstone, that forced the Great Powers to awaken from their diplomatic indifference, to put the Bulgarian question on the negotiating table, and ultimately to create the political and international prerequisites for the liberation of Bulgaria, which received its real historical realization as a result of the Russo-Turkish War of Liberation of 1877–1878. Without McGahan’s voice, the world might have remained deaf to the cries of a suffering people; without Gladstone’s pen, the political will of Europe might have remained paralysed by the cynical pragmatism of the Great Powers.
For more information and to learn how to support the publishers, please contact:
Dimitar Tomov, Bulgarian Bestseller Publishing House
tel.: 0876103058
e-mail: dimitartomov1@gmail.com
www.bgbestseller.com